Blue Iris Poems and Essays

I wouldn’t mind being a rose

in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.

Reason they have not yet thought of.

Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.

Or any other foolish question.

Do you think there is any

personal heaven

for any of us?

Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,

will call to us, meaning us?

But also I say this: that light

is an invitation

to happiness,

and that happiness,

when it’s done right,

is a kind of holiness,

palpable and redemptive.

Neither did we know many of the names of the flowering plants. But one doesn’t need to know the names to feel the presences. I say this without any leaning against knowledge. But I say it with a passion for the worth of feeling—the simple, powerful response to beauty.

And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light-filled bodies?

Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Something is wrong, I knowit, ifI don't keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn't choose them, I don't fault them, but it took time to reject them.

Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

If this was lost, let us all be lost always.

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Never in my life had I felt so plush, or so slippery, or so resplendently empty.

If you can sing, do it. If not, even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise, from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness,palpable and redemptive.

I think I will always be lonely in this world, where the cattle graze like a black and white river where the ravishing lilies melt, without protest, on their tongues where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss, just rises and floats away.

What I mean is, could I forget myself even in those feathery fields? When van Gogh preached to the poor of course he wanted to save someone most of all himself.

[..] the sweet odor of prayer.

And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be, the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

Now that l'm free to be myself, who am I?

Will somebody or something please start to sing?