Poetry | What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?

What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?

Stand still. The trees ahead
and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers.
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it you may come back again.
saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you.
You art surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Northwest Native American Tradition

translated by David Wagoner

Poetry | THE HOURS by Gavin Keeney

THE HOURS

Romantic rites of passion,
Romantic rights of way
And crossings,
Are temporal affairs
Of heart versus world,
Blood versus stone,
And full, as all cups are full,
Of purposeless beauty --
All cups that are holy,
Or on the way
To the divine.

Both draught and draft,
Candle and mirror,
De La Tour and Poussin --
Image cancels image,
Toward dark revelation,
Sword and sphere,
Cataclysm and composure,
Spirit out of spirit born,
Worlds turned upside-down
Forming worlds.

A new Romantic spirit comes
From levelled fields,
Dark currents and
Dark rivers, cities, forests;
All turns to smoke and ash,
To corresponding tableau,
Returning life in holy measure,
Vision re-naturalized,
All temporal earth torn open,
And all theurgic urges turned,
Toward the transfiguration
Of the "Earth".

Horses cross fields,
Charcoal burners
Inhabit the woods,
The sky fills with hawks --
Vision returns on wings,
Time closes upon itself,
Revels end in worlds
Opening on worlds,
The paradigmatic
Hour upon hour.

The signature of Time
Is the hour (the tone),
Sound and step, at once,
Tower and view,
River and current,
Wind and wood and snow;
Or the signature of life
Is time (hour by hour),
From horizon to horizon,
From ear to eye.

GK (02/14/11)

The Poet’s Habitat

“Be still not only in the room where you write, but in the place where you live, coming to know it by your unknowing relationship with it. In this way you will come to know the world.”
Wesley McNair

Making a poem intimate and individual but, ultimately, universal carries with it that sense of imaginative achievement which is a primary factor in life and in art. Equally vital is a need to have an uncharted relationship with the stillness of the place where the writing occurs.
Every poem is an enactment. As it unfolds, it suggests multiple meanings which can never be fully fathomed, although the poet cannot impede its true impulse.
There is never an answer in a poem, but the poet and the reader are there to discover what they did not know they knew, and to use that knowledge as a compass bearing.

Irene Mitchell