Thank-You Note

I owe so much

to those I don’t love.

The relief as I agree

that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I’m not

the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,

the freedom –

love can neither give

nor take that.

I don’t wait for them,

as in window-to-door-and-back.

Almost as patient

as a sundial,

I understand

what love can’t,

and forgive

as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter

is just a few days or weeks,

not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,

concerts are heard,

cathedrals visited,

scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers

come between us,

the hills and rivers

can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit

if I live in three dimensions,

in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space

with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don’t realize

how much they hold in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them a thing,”

would be love’s answer

to this open question.

Wisława Szymborska

“Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be……and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this:  

Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe.  

I will keep it safe.”

 

All the time I pray to Buddha 

I keep on 

    killing mosquitoes.

                        Kobayashi Issa 

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shibiku

I never removed anyone 

from my life, they all died 

in the accident of trust. 

                   - Fyodor Dostoevsky 

                   

The Rival by Sylvia Plath

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

XII

If we have become incapable
of thought, then the brute-thought
of mere power and mere greed
will think for us.

If we have become incapable
of denying ourselves anything,
then all that we have
will be taken from us.

If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.

These are merely the laws of this world
as known to Shakespeare, as known to Milton.

When we cease from human thought,
a low and effective cunning
stirs in the most inhuman minds.

Wendell Berry