Deep Magic

[Image: “When It Exceeds Our Ability to Understand,” by Fred Mancosu on Flickr.
(Click to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river (from which I could have selected the entire week’s offerings):

Alternate Endings

There are times when they gather at the edge of your life,
Shadows slipping over the far hills, daffodils
blooming too early, the dark matter of the universe
that threads its way through the few thousand blackbirds
that have invaded the trees out back. Every ending

sloughs off our dreams like snakeskin. This is the kind of
black ice the mind skids across. The candlelight burning down
into the sand. The night leaving its ashes in our eyes.

There are times when your voice turns over in my sleep.
It is no longer blind. The sky is no longer deaf.

There are times when it seems the stars practice
all night just to become fireflies, when it seems there is
no end to what our hearts scribble on corridor walls.
Only when we look at each other do we cease to be ourselves.
Only at a certain height does the smoke blend into air.
There are times when your words seem welded to that sky.

There are times when love is so complicated it circles
like chimney swifts unable to decide where to land.
There are endings so sad their shadows scuff the dirt.
Their sky is as inconsolable as the two year old, Zahra,
torn from her mother and beaten to death in the Sudan.

There are endings so sad I want the morning light
to scourge the fields. Endings that are only what the river
dreams when it dries up. Endings that are constant echoes.

There are times when I think we are satellites collecting
dust from one of the earlier births of the universe Don’t give up.

Each ending is an hourglass filled with doors. There are times
when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read
what is written on the far sides of stars. I’m nearly out of time.
My heart is a dragonfly. I’ll have to settle for this, standing under
a waterfall of words you never said. There are times like this
when no ending appears, times when I am so inconsolably happy.

(Richard Jackson [source])

…and:

We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem.

(John Hay [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Birds, Disappearing

Last spring at the Catholic church, they found
the outline of a bird etched on a window,
glass splintering where the wings had spread
like flames. But there was no blood or feathers,
no light bones crumpled at the sill. It was a miracle
and then the same thing happened at the Lutheran
church down the street. No one took note.
It had been done. Still, that summer birds
exploded in my mind. Those mornings
I awoke to my room on fire for ten minutes:
cut tulips in the vase burning from within.
I worried about bodies, how to touch them,
where they go. If they’re just cast out
into the weeds. It’s November now and sunlight
has slunk around the south wall, tired of me,
my arrangements of dried leaves. I trace
the patterns of migrating geese. Over and over
they drive a wedge into the sky. It is raining
broken glass. I count every fallen thing.

(Bethany Schultz Hurst [source])

…and:

Now we realize that this whole zoo of sub-atomic particles, thousands of them coming out of our accelerators, can be explained by little vibrating strings. They’re like a violin string. The Pythagoreans, the Greeks, believed that violin strings were in some sense a paradigm for the universe. They didn’t quite know how it would fit, but the harmonies of the universe, they thought, would be manifest by the harmonies of a violin string. The Pythagoreans founded a school of Greek philosophy trying to find in nature harmonies and resonances. Well, that’s the analogy today, too. In fact, the quarks, according to Murray Gell-Mann, the inventor of the quark model and winner of the Nobel prize, said that the simplest representation of the quark is that it’s nothing but the vibration of a string, and these strings, in turn, can only vibrate in ten dimensions. If you have an 11-dimensional universe it decays back down to ten. Ten is the magic number that works. The irony is that western reductionism, which believes in smashing things apart in order to find the ultimate constituents of matter… these reductionists have always laughed at holists and the people who believe in Buddhism, Taoism, whatever, and the irony is that by smashing these particles to their smallest constituents, we then find strings that only vibrate in the ten-dimensional universe and all of a sudden we realize that you have to look at the whole universe in order to understand the quantum theory! So, in some sense now were combining the best traditions of holism and reductionism.

(Michio Kaku [source])

…and:

A Letter in October

Dawn comes later and later now,
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning
watching the light walk down the hill
to the edge of the pond and place
a doe there, shyly drinking,

then see the light step out upon
the water, sowing reflections
to either side—a garden
of trees that grew as if by magic—
now see no more than my face,
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,

startled by time. While I slept,
night in its thick winter jacket
bridled the doe with a twist
of wet leaves and led her away,
then brought its black horse with harness
that creaked like a cricket, and turned

the water garden under. I woke,
and at the waiting window found
the curtains open to my open face;
beyond me, darkness. And I,
who only wished to keep looking out,
must now keep looking in.

(Ted Kooser [source])