Too Much… But Listen to It, Ringing Soft and Low

[Image: “Black Walnuts, by the Thousand,” by John E. Simpson; a sample from my gallery called #plantsthatlookgood. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo, taken in early 2018, doesn’t do justice to the enormous quantity of the things beneath the tree from which they’d fallen. Nevertheless, in my mind, for some reason I’ve always associated it with the notion of “profusion.”]

From whiskey river:

The History of Too Much

There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle,
the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant —
the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay,
these especially are too much, the temples and statues
in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all.
This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years
of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric —
their weight has whittled the people: the weight of that antiquity,
of those stones, the grandeur and pride — too much
in this moment, this present crushed by the evidence,
the result of living with beheaded gods, and maimed still
beautiful torsos, the muscled limbs in chipped robes.
They plague our dreams, what was once achieved is now
incomplete, these pieces of the golden age aging
in the midst of traffic, too much, the yelling and honking,
the protests in the middle of everything — people are impatient;
how can anyone be patient, overwhelmed as they are.
Even the oregano’s thick perfume, the sapphire sea, remind people
of extravagant loves and sacrifice, while here, now,
ghosts live on as gods and their impossibility.

(Adrianne Kalfopoulou [source; also see here])

…and:

I had this sudden awareness […] of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know, like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars.

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

Singing Bowl

Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.

Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now,
This moment’s pulse, this rhythm in your blood

And listen to it, ringing soft and low.
Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow.

Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
Is richness out of emptiness,
And timelessness resounding into time.

And when the heart is full of quietness
Begin the Song exactly where you are.

(Malcolm Guite [source — and don’t miss the video of Guite voicing the poem himself])

Not from whiskey river:

Things here [in a little-celebrated side corridor of the Museum of Natural History] are also unbeautiful because nothing has been touched since 1951. Occasionally the displays may be dusted—very occasionally, it seems—but the neglect softly shows. A green apple meant to show something about yellow jackets has lost its bugs and acquired a fuzzy, puckered skin. A museum employee tells the tale of a Barbie doll that somehow found its way inside one display in the 1990s, perhaps a relic of a careless visitor on a behind-the-scenes tour. It stayed wedged in there for years, until a new director or department head brought a new conscientiousness to their post. Would someone get that thing out of there? Each display’s title—“Life in the Water,” “Cycle of Nutrition and Decay”—is written in a soft, mid-century cursive that leaves no question as to the decade of its origin. The only change ever made to the hall may be in the agriculture display, a relatively grand set of convex windows at the far end of the hall. A figure of a bare-breasted Indian woman holds a hoe: “The Forest Primeval.” Then “The Settlement 1790,” “The High Tide 1840,” “The Ebb 1870.” And finally a little John Deere tractor and plow with a little yellow-shirted farmer in the driver’s seat sit above a sign that says “1950.” If you look closely, though, you can see the smudged outline of the original lettering: “TODAY.”

[…]

A young family—two parents and their daughter in a stroller—walks by briskly. The father says, without stopping, “Oh look! ‘Apple Orchard in Dutchess County, New York.’ That’s right by…” and launches into a story about somewhere in Massachusetts. But even though they keep walking, this is a moment of what [the museum’s director starting in 1942] wanted. There is little else in the entire museum that a visitor can so easily and sincerely connect to his own experience. Who knows where that man and his family were headed next—they had the sense of purpose most often seen en route to the exit—but still, the museum had welcomed them in, and said, This is the story of your world. This is your world, and this is its story.

(Jaime Green [source])

…and:

After an Illness, Walking the Dog

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.

(Jane Kenyon [source])