poetry pocket: love, czesław milosz

love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things.

dear little voice,

it remains my small ambition to transform my terror into a fascinated traveller.

Milosz, 20th Century Poet and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

so I’m taking my time remembering the names of birds. and I’m wasting more than I’m taking, listening to the night grow its stars over these words. i see one thing. i see more: like wysteria hanging its little heads over the neighbour’s gate, dust on windowsills and found notepaper.

i miss people. i read the newspaper. i take off my shoes often. i fill my home with fistfuls of wildflowers, soil in the sink— immaculate kinds of disorder— mottled rosemary in the carpet by the door: a museum of every beautiful thing i ever pulled out of the ground and dragged into my life running.

i even saw Jupiter one night— but only because i wasn’t looking. up. First it was dark and silent and then somebody cried: it’s Jupiter! and it was different suddenly the night undid itself and we all cried out too: Jupiter! even me, me who didn’t see the planet at all, just watched the alive people around me instead, thrilling and clean and bright with night as any dying light.

you see i am mostly a genius when i am forgetting myself. i am mostly a genius when i don’t see myself at all.

“Quatre Saisons“ by Takako Ugachi

i want to be like the man in that old story who opened his mouth and never closed it. i want to be like the man in the story who opened his mouth and took it all into his mouth: the sunsets, hot and patient, the glasses of wine and chestnuts in flower, the sound of crickets, the newspapers, the width of the sea, butter-yellow light, every tremendous argument— thrilling beasts of care— the spring, the rain, july and june too, the final kiss at the train station, swimming pools and typewritten pages, oranges, letters, and words, each quickening anger and blush, the ease of perfectly untidy days and the embarrassment of every heartache, humiliating gesture, cheap take-away and handshakes and all the bliss and sustainable agony of my life.

Gift, Czeslaw Milosz

maybe there is no gift on this earth except the one we imagine, the one we pursue or the one we remember.

maybe the stroke that wipes out this longing is called love.

maybe.

one thing i do know now is that we are simply less afraid together.

Flower seller in Istanbul, Turkey, Charles Weever Cushman

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that: “understanding is love’s other name”.

sometimes we feel that in other to understand ourselves, we have to move closer with the astute devotion of a scientist studying cells beneath a microscope.

but when we study cells beneath a microscope, we are not studying cells beneath a microscope. we are studying cells beneath a microscope changing— changing into more of themselves. changing into less of themselves— into more of world itself.

and we realise, perhaps, that it is not one thing we love, or ourselves that we need to— but the whole thing itself.

and then a bird or a tree says to you: friend.

that’s why you’ll see me there one day, little voice: standing by the little droplets falling in the sink. my mouth open and my eyes closed. years will pass between those drops. if you love me you won’t say a word.

quiet your breath, my love— don’t you know i’m standing in the ripeness?

i’m on to some real good thing.

love,

ars poetica.

---

little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. my work will always be completely free, and takes considerable Time and Love to give to you several days a week. if it has brought you Joy, consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:

---

“I swear, there is in me no wizardry of word.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree”
- Milosz

Leonard Cohen.