“So is it study or is it art?”

The first is a wick drawn by a practiced hand, straight through wax. Patience dipped again and again to fill out a candle’s form, layer on layer for length, strength and stability. There is dedication in study, repeated practice like a mantra, mastery a form of devotion. You give yourself and you give your time, your attention. You receive something human-born, earthy, quiet.  

Somewhere in between acquaintance and friend I asked why?, and she answered: I survived cancer. 

It was some years ago, she said, a decade now without another challenge. I counted back: how young! And the thought dissolved - as some thoughts do - becoming a gentle interior rain, washing down to common ground, what is was lost, is loosing its grip, will be taken away. I was trying to remember where that exact feeling, or a feeling closely akin, had touched me before: it is aligned with beauty. It might have been the first curl and browning edge of a rose petal. It might be a spot on the stem. If there were no beauty, the sense would not be the same…

entre lágrima e sal
seca sal, sol que seca
entre chuva e a mão
horas, memórias que dá

a lágrima como chuva cai
cámera lenta, amor
ví o rosto de espelho
na sua joía líquida

descendo como raío
doa sal, olho que olha
de luz de dor de benção
que faz fechar as mãos

there was music so loud you could not sleep if you wanted to - but of course you did not want to sleep. the river of rhythm carried your body, unlike the river lethe, instead the river life. maybe it was better yet a river i had not witnessed, that my youth did not spoil its beauty in familiarity, rather deepened its shout and the shine of the lights upon its surface. the faces saw but did not acknowledge me: they were my face, and i was theirs. one body moved with the beat of a thousand hearts. and a thousand minds let go and became a single thought, held by the drums and the dance and the dream.

a river doesn’t practice how to flow it lets go

from the instant it was born and falls into the arms of its bed

its being wells up against what you or I would call an obstacle and melts around it

if you think you are dammed up, well ask your breath for a word of advice

~

a lover passes easy hours on the simple tasks of living but cannot bear a second of her beloved’s voice outside the door her dam is burst and river runs to meet the ocean

Was there not a flower found its sun
through simple blossoming? I thought that’s how it’s done
ignore the driven wooden root, ignore the thorn’s intent
instead, invest in feminine receipt
and open petals, welcome summer’s heat.

Was there a flower couldn’t find the sun
through simple blossoming? Its wooden nail
is buried in the soil; still all its vigor’s spent
to cripple stone and guzzle draughts of earth
and bloom: that’s what its living meant.

This weekend, 60 people gathered to celebrate the art of love - as expressed in the gentle and sweet music of Enid Ames, modern musician and composer of southern New Hampshire, and in the words of Jelalludin Rumi, b 1207 in what was then the eastern margin of the Persian Empire, and what is now the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan.

Enid’s sets were interspersed with a spoken verse; asked to read a favorite, I opened Coleman Barks Essential Rumi to Chapter 8: Being a Lover ~ The Sunrise Ruby, and found a poem I had not read before.

The back of the Canadian $10 note bears the motto “In Service of Peace”, and below it, a poem.

Although Lieut. Col. John McRae had been a doctor for years, and had served in the South African War, he could never dull himself to the suffering, the screams, and the blood, and had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men – Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans – in the Ypres salient, one of the more horrific battlefields of WW I.

Under the gauze of midnight, where the mirrored starlight wanes
boughs of the aging branches range in the city’s floodlit lanes
like the arms of assembled sentinels, who saluted you as you came
then recruited the shadows in your wake to softly repeat your name

Softly they hold your name, my love, as a breeze will hold the song
two smiling, gently sighing lips released to the game of alone
like falling stars, the words reduce the dark, if not for long
but a flash of light is enough for a sight of the ground and the path to home

"
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as, the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

Circle of golden sunlight
     and at its margin, shadow;
     obscuring body of midnight
and of its limbs, meadow

if I walk from one place I find
the road leads to the other

I loved the easy glance of youth
and tried all ways to keep it:

circle of golden sunlight
     we’re dancing with our shadows;
     robes of velvet midnight
around our limbs is gathered

1 - 2 - 3 - 4
     the names of numbers spoken
     learned in the rote of the daily
while nightly the rote is stolen