Coleman Barks

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest

where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that sight becomes this art.

An ant hurries along a threshing floor

with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks

of wheat, not knowing the abundance

all around. It thinks its one grain

is all there is to love.

So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.

Poems

are rough notations for the music we are.

Philosophers have said that we love music

because it resembles the sphere-sounds

of union. We’ve been part of a harmony

before, so these moments of treble and bass

keep our remembering fresh

Close the language-door (the mouth). Open the love-window (the eyes). The moon (the reflected light of the divine) won’t use the door, only the window.

Heart has plundered mind of its eloquence.

Love writes a transparent calligraphy, so on

the empty page my soul can read and recollect.

or your own genuine solitude?

The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love.

My friend John Seawright used to say that the real tragedy is when you don’t feel much of anything when someone dies.

Your deepest presence is in every small

contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

as birdwings.

Love comes with a knife, not some

shy question, and not with fears

for its reputation! I say

these things disinterestedly. Accept them

in kind. Love is a madman,

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,

running through the mountains, drinking poison,

and now quietly choosing annihilation.