It was Wallace Stevens’s birthday, so I let myself wander back through the poems of his that have been living, quietly, in my pockets. I’ve written about a handful on my site over the years—how the worldly and the otherworldly pour through him like light through colored glass. 

There’s the wry funeral hymn of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, where pleasure and mortality sit across the same kitchen table; the little fable I once called “proof that life continues after death”, which is really about how imagination won’t stop working even when the world says stop; the bright elegy “Mozart, 1935”, where music keeps the window open; a few philosophical miniatures that felt like stones in the pocket; and the mountain that got traded out for a poem, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.” 

There are three additional ones that I like but I haven't posted yet: Sunday Morning, Anecdote of the Jar, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I have posted those below, 

Every birthday is an excuse to reread, but this time two small tributes found me—poems written for him, or to him, or in his neighborhood. Reading them was like bumping into a friend of a friend who not only remembers your favorite stories but tells them in a new key.

Here’s the first, by David Ignatow:

In Memoriam, 1879–1979
On an Ordinary Evening

by David Ignatow

I am back to walking alone
through silent streets lit by colorful windows
of the homes of responsible men and women,
and I refuse responsibility.
I am weeping without tears,
with hands jammed into pockets
under trees smelling of leaves
and grass of the gardens—
smelling the silence of stolidity
and peace and wanting no peace
until it is written in my poems.

And here’s the second, printed in Mānoa:

Wallace Stevens Walks by the Sea

And now it is that it rises.
Beyond what we can hear,
the whole ocean as a hand
across a mouth. I walk
and it is only this thought.
And it is only this darkness that
lies on the eyes like two coins.
Everything beautiful is also in motion,
isn’t that a curious thing.
If you look closely enough
you fall down a flight of stairs,
the constellations on their little wheels,
the ocean everywhere.

Why do these feel so Stevensy without ever dressing up in his vocabulary? Maybe because they step onto his stage—the everyday world—and speak his verb: to make. Stevens kept reminding us (with the gentle stubbornness of someone who knew both premiums and poems) that art is not something pinned under glass; it’s a present-tense action. In “Of Modern Poetry” he names it plain: “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / what will suffice.” Ignatow’s ending—“wanting no peace / until it is written in my poems”—is that same ethic in work boots. No peace until the making happens.

Ignatow also borrows Stevens’s sidewalk: the city block, “silent streets,” windows lit up with the lives of “responsible men and women.” It’s hard not to hear the long, lucid walk of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven pacing under his lines—the way Stevens tests thought against stoops and hedges, how the metaphysical keeps glancing off a literal windowpane. (If you want just one page to keep by your tea, the Poetry Foundation bio and the lovely Stevens 101 sketch this late style well.)

The sea-walk poem turns the compass the other way—back to water, the great theater of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In Key West, the ocean makes “the constant cry,” and a human voice arranges that noise into something like song; here, the ocean becomes “a hand / across a mouth.” It’s a gorgeous reversal: the inhuman doesn’t shout; it hushes. When the sea covers the mouth, thinking has to sing. That’s Stevens all over—the pressure on the imagination to answer the world, not by escaping it but by answering it in kind.

Then there’s that line, “Everything beautiful is also in motion,” which, if you’ve read Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, feels like a friendly paraphrase of the rule that beauty (and truth) must change. Stevens writes somewhere that reality is the activity of the mind among its images; the tribute poem gives us the mind’s balance problem: look closely enough and “you fall down a flight of stairs,” past the bannister of the visible into “constellations on their little wheels.” That drop—from close domestic detail into starry scale—is a trick Stevens loved, whether in “The Auroras of Autumn” or the sea-mirroring stanzas of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” The last line here—“the ocean everywhere”—reads like a one-line biography of his imagination.

I keep circling back to the mood both tributes share: a kind of lucid sorrow. Ignatow calls it “weeping without tears,” and in Stevens’s own late work the weather is similar—“The Plain Sense of Things” has “this blank cold, this sadness without cause.” But notice what both tributes inherit besides the weather: the remedy. Not denial, not grand consolation—just the honest labor of making. Walk. Look. Think. Make. If there’s peace, it only arrives after the poem, not before.

So on his birthday I end up where I usually end up with Stevens: grateful for the way he lets the ordinary keep its ordinariness while asking it very large questions. Grateful for the brisk hand he lends to newer poets who want to think in the open air. And grateful for how his poems, even when they face the cold, keep a stove going. If the mountain can be replaced by a poem, as he once wrote, maybe a little of the sea and the street can be, too—not to erase them, but to meet them with a music we ourselves make.

More - 

A documentary on Wallace Stevens:

A good lecture on Wallace Stevens: 

Lovely picks. Here are concise notes plus full texts (all public-domain) for each.

Anecdote of the Jar 

A tiny parable about art’s power to impose order: a plain jar “takes dominion” over a “slovenly wilderness,” raising questions about whether culture clarifies or colonizes nature. Stevens keeps the diction bare—“gray and bare”—so the form enacts the idea. Many readers hear echoes of modernism’s cool confidence (and its limits): once the jar arrives, everything rearranges itself around it, yet the jar “did not give of bird or bush.” Control isn’t the same as life.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Sunday Morning 

A meditation that begins with “coffee and oranges” and opens into the big argument of Harmonium: can earthly beauty and mortal joy suffice without Christian transcendence? Across eight cantos, Stevens contrasts churchly “ancient sacrifice” with a pagan fidelity to the here-and-now—“Death is the mother of beauty.” The poem’s music moves from lush description to metaphysical clarity, ending not in despair but in a luminous acceptance of a world “Unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable.”

I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths—
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness—
She makes the willows shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new-plucked pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.

VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn.
Their boisterous devotion to the sun—
Not as a god, but as a god might be—
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 

A prism of 13 tiny visions, each tilting the world a degree. The blackbird becomes a device for seeing how perception makes reality—sometimes comic (“O thin men of Haddam”), sometimes crystalline (“I was of three minds”). Its spare lines and musical pauses (that famous “or just after”) show Stevens testing how much meaning can live in minimal images. The result is both playful and philosophical: a manual for attention.

Text
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

It’s raining outside today, the kind that makes the backyard shine like it had a long awaited bath, and I’m thinking about that in-between time—after summer’s haze, before winter’s snow—and about a small poem I saw via the Emily Dickinson Museum. I pulled up “Besides the Autumn poets sing.” Even in the first line, we know this is going to be not just about Autumn, but also about poets. And it is going to be expansive.  Let us figure out if the poets are singing besides the autumn, or if autumn itself is singing, and does besides here means "next to" or "in addition to" -- if we know Emily well, it's likely going to be all these and more!

When I go outside to sit on my covered into the am sitting with a book of Mary Oliver and one of the chapbooks from Rattle (Sky Mall by Eric Kocher).  The outside is so sharp. I love this season. It is not hot, it is not cold. This is also the case with Sprint, but spring has pollen and this is the cleanest of the seasons. The clearest.  The best season I think. When the drizzle gets harder, some birds start running around in the sky haphazardly - not the normal patterns we see. It is obvious, they are trying to balance their flights to the drops of rain. 

What delights me about Emily is how, in a handful of words, she clears a whole stage. With two quick nods, she waves off the grand, showy version of fall: Mr. Bryant’s “golden-rod” and Mr. Thomson’s harvest “sheaves”. Those links open into big rooms—Bryant’s elegy with its last bright blooms; Thomson’s rolling, “crown’d with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf” pageant—and yet Emily just says “Gone” and ushers us into the skinny hallway where the season actually lives. The old poets are a pathway to the current season. Today’s rain feels like that hallway: a hinge, not a spectacle. (Project Gutenberg)

Then she gets micro. “Still, is the bustle in the Brook— / Sealed are the spicy valves—.” I love how spicy valves makes you smell the pods even as they close. And “Mesmeric fingers softly touch / The eyes of many Elves—” is such a charming way to say dusk or frost is tucking the meadow in for sleep. If you like following her breadcrumbs, the prowling Bee’s note on this poem is a good companion—warm, readable, and full of small observations you can carry on a wet walk. I keep it open here like a second mug of tea. (Blogging Dickinson)

There’s also the last, quiet turn: “Perhaps a squirrel may remain— / My sentiments to share—.” It’s an almost comic image—just you and a squirrel agreeing that the air has changed—before the little prayer about temperament: a mind sunny enough to bear the wind’s will. I don’t know if I want the “sunny mind” today; I want the windy will itself. But I recognize the move: the weather out there becomes weather in here, and the poem teaches you how to feel it without demanding a postcard version of joy. If you want to see the text set cleanly on the page, the Poets.org version is perfect for a reread between rain bands; and if you want to wander further into the sources she’s teasing, there’s more Thomson in The Seasons on Wikisource. (Home)

So that’s my little weather report. The gutters are singing second parts, the sidewalk ferns are uncurling like punctuation, and Dickinson—link by link, line by line—makes this narrow slice of the year feel enormous. I start with the museum, read the poem, peek at Bryant and Thomson, and end up back at the window, happy in whatever green the rain is willing to give. (emilydickinsonmuseum.org)

I didn’t know Tony Harrison well; I only came to a handful of his poems. But even in those few, I heard something that reminded me of the principles of gurbani—that while the world divides us by class, voice, and circumstance, the truth of oneness still runs underneath. Harrison’s distinct, unyielding cadence refuses to smooth over the raw edges of grief and silence, and in this refusal I recognized a kinship: eloquence is not in polished words but in unflinching truth. For him, poetry was a public act of resistance against everything—propriety, political power, personal pain—that seeks to silence the individual. “Poetry is all busking,” he declared, and his verse stands as a testament to that belief. (For some of the poems I talk about, please see the end of this essay)

A Poet of Divisions

Harrison was, fundamentally, a poet of divisions: between classes, between fathers and sons, between public graffiti and private grief. His poems inhabit these fractures, compelling readers to confront the uncomfortable realities they represent.

In “Turns,” he captures the painful self-awareness of class mobility by trying on his father’s cap, a self-conscious attempt to look:

“more ‘working class’
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!).”

The line is both comic in its youthful posturing and tragic in its recognition that identity is not a costume. The poem’s devastating conclusion—his father collapsing dead, his cap turned inside out in a final, futile gesture—crystallizes the division. The son then vows to speak where his father could not:

“He never begged. For nowt! Death’s reticence
crowns his life’s, and me, I’m opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.”

Here, filial grief is transformed into social indictment, pitting a father’s dignified silence against a son’s educated outcry.

Elegies of Division

This theme of intractable division continues in Harrison’s elegies for his parents. In “Long Distance II,” the separation is from the dead. His father, unable to accept his wife’s absence, performs rituals of denial:

“Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.”

The haunting detail of the slippers is a testament to love made visible through small, desperate acts. Harrison, the rational son, claims, “I believe life ends with death, and that is all,” yet confesses he still dials his father’s old, disconnected number. The poem leaves the reader suspended in this contradiction between reason and ache, a division Harrison refuses to resolve because it is so central to the human experience of loss.

“Book Ends” frames this division as silence. A mother’s observation, “You’re like book ends, the pair of you,” becomes a painful irony after her death, as father and son are left holding nothing together. Harrison writes: “only our silence made us seem a pair.” Their shared grief does not close the gap but sharpens it:

“Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.”

This is the central paradox of Harrison’s art: the language that empowers him also isolates him. The books that gave him a voice built a wall between him and the man who raised him, a schism that persists powerfully in cultures where education and accent still sort people into insiders and outsiders.

Ashes and Endurance

“Marked with D.” may be his most brutal elegy, but it, too, insists on fracture. The baker father is returned to the ovens of his trade:

“When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life…”

Ash becomes flour; cremation becomes a form of baking. The pun feels almost indecent until it is understood as an act of fidelity to a working-class life, stripped of euphemism. The poem then pivots from this stark metaphor to a moment of piercing intimacy, recalling the name his father used for his mother:

“not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.”

The poem is built on this division—between brutal punning and profound tenderness, between the crematorium fire and the memory of a beloved’s name.

If Book Ends depicts silence between men, Marked with D. shows how plain, unsentimental words can preserve what death extinguishes. Harrison admits, “Sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach,” but offers poetry as a more enduring monument than faith.

This endurance is symbolized in “Timer,” where his mother’s wedding ring survives the cremation:

“Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.”

The burnished circle is both an ordinary object and a sacred relic, locating permanence not in grand cathedrals but in crematoriums, dog-eared phone books, and worn-out caps.

Private Grief, Public Rage

Harrison’s exploration of division extends from the private to the public sphere. His most notorious poem, “V.,” confronts the desecration of his parents’ gravestone in Leeds during the miners’ strike. Faced with obscene graffiti, football chants, and political rage, Harrison does not recoil but writes directly into the violence of the language itself:

“the Leeds United scarf, the beer, the fags,
the same graffiti, litter, dogshit, stones.”

Critics who called the poem obscene missed the point; its necessity lies in its confrontation. V. stages a battle between the cultivated lyric and the profane demotic, honoring the validity of both. It is not merely about a vandalized wall but about the walls of class, politics, and language that run through Britain—walls that remain firmly in place.

Why Harrison Matters Now

Harrison’s legacy is a reminder that grief is not linear but fractured, marked by fury, silence, and the dark humor of survival. He teaches that class is not a costume but a bone-deep inheritance that shapes the very words in our mouths, and that poetry can cross divides without erasing them.

We live in a time of divisions: of politics, of speech, of memory itself. It is a good time for poetry in general, and for Tony Harrison in particular. His work reminds us that poems can be both blunt instruments and finely tuned laments; they can call out the violence of systems while preserving the tenderness of a father’s voice calling his wife “Florrie.”

At a moment when we risk speaking only in outrage or retreating into silence, Harrison shows another way: to busk in the public square, to say the unsayable, and to let poetry carry the weight that politics alone cannot.

Tony Harrison is gone, but the poems remain. They are, like the ring in Timer, what the fire could not consume. They are the busker’s song that outlasts the closing of the trap, the word that stubbornly, brilliantly, marks the “D” for all of us.

And here, I hear an echo of gurbani. Where Harrison exposes division, Guru Arjan reminds us of the oneness beneath it: “na ko bairi, nahi begana” — no one is my enemy, no one is a stranger. To hold both truths — fracture and unity — is perhaps the task of our time. Poetry, in Harrison’s busking cadences and in the hymns of the Gurus, carries us across that chasm, showing us the fire of division and the flame of oneness, both still burning in us today.

Some Poems of Tony Harrison

Today I Ask Waris Shah

Today I ask Waris Shah—say something from some grave.
Turn a fresh, unbloodied page; start some new story of love.
One daughter of Punjab wept & you wrote an entire scripture;
today a million daughters weep—why are you silent, Waris Shah?
Rise, tender to the tender; rise and look: fields seeded with bodies,
see Chenab’s red sentence running on without a period.
Someone slipped poison into the five bright throats of the rivers;
now the earth drinks venom & the earth coughs venom back.
Every fiber of this fertile cloth is crimson—every clot, wrath after wrath.
The old lament threads the forests, turns each bamboo flute into a snake.
The snake-charmers’ spells went mute; the fangs learned our language.
Sting after sting: mouths nailed to human skin, Punjab turning blue.
Songs snapped in the lanes; the girls’ spinning-circle fell silent, unspooled.
Robbers on bridal beds; swings torn from pipal arms; the love-flute lost.
Brothers of Ranjha forget his way; blood oozes even out of graves.
Princesses of love are crying among tombs; Kaido is everywhere—
a thief of beauty & ardor in every mirror. Where are you, Waris Shah?
Wake up. Turn a fresh, unbloodied page; start some new story of love.

- Translation by Shivpreet Singh

Start some new story of love - An Explanatory Haibun

There was a poet called Waris Shah. He lived in a land named Punjab—“five waters”—where rivers braided through fields of wheat and mustard and memory. Waris wrote a long love-story, Heer Ranjha, about a girl named Heer and a boy named Ranjha. Their love was stubborn and musical; Ranjha played a bamboo flute (wanjhli), and the sound made even stubborn hearts lean closer. People in Punjab say Waris Shah wrote not just a romance, but a manual for the heart.

five rivers sing—
one word for water, love
spoken five ways

Long after Waris Shah died, the land was torn in two. Neighbors who had shared bread and songs were separated by lines on paper. This is called Partition. In the poem, the speaker calls to Waris Shah: “Come back, speak from your grave.” She asks the old master of love to wake and witness a new sorrow—daughters weeping by the thousands, families scattered, songs broken.

border on a map—
ink dries, but the wound
stays wet

In Heer Ranjha there is an uncle named Kaido. He fears love’s freedom and whispers poison into the family’s ear. In the poem, “everyone is Kaido” means betrayal has multiplied—pettiness, envy, and violence crowd the lanes where children once chased kites. The girls’ tiranjan—their evening spinning circle—and the charkha (spinning wheel) were places where women wove thread and community. When the poem says the songs and spindles stop, it means daily life has been snapped—silence replacing the ordinary music of making.

spindle gone still—
night hears its own breath
lose cadence

The poem names the Chenab—one of Punjab’s great rivers—and says it runs with blood. It says poison was poured into the five rivers, and the earth drank it. This is not chemistry; it is moral weather. When water is bitter, the fields grow grief. When it says every bamboo flute became a snake, it means the sweet pastoral music of Ranjha’s wanjhli has twisted into a hiss: tenderness turned to threat.

flute to hiss—
same hollow reed
another wind

You may also hear the name Bulleh Shah—another Punjabi poet, singer of fearless love. He scolded the proud and comforted the poor, saying the real temple is your heart and the real ritual is kindness. Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah are like two old trees on the same road: one tells the parable of lovers, the other sings the parable of the soul. Both ask us to be larger than our fears.

two saints of dust—
one plays, one sings
same note

When the poem mentions the pipal tree (sacred fig), it points to a village companion: shade, gossip, prayer, swings tied to its arms for festivals. To say even the pipal’s arms are torn is to say even the tree of gathering has become witness to separation. When snake-charmers’ spells fail, and fangs take human flesh, the tricks of calming violence no longer work; cruelty has learned our language.

pipal without swings—
summer stands up
nowhere to rest

At the end, the speaker begs: “Open the Book of Love and turn a new page.” She is not asking for an escape into romance. She is asking for a revision of how we live: a page where neighbors are neighbors again, daughters safe, songs unbroken. She is asking for love to become public policy.

new page—
river drinks light
forgets the knife

Here is a poem from Robert Hass, one of the poets from whom I first began learning English poetry. What fascinates me about this piece is not only its beauty but how it quietly teaches us to meditate.

John Muir, A Dream, A Waterfall, A Mountain Ash

by Robert Hass

I had been given two pieces of writing to read.
One was a description of my childhood kitchen
in which, beneath the calm and orderly prose,
something was beating frantically against the walls
like a trapped bat. The other piece contained a small door
you could actually crawl through. It led to the ridge
of a canyon from which you could look down
into an orchard. I knew it was Canyon de Chelly,
knew Kit Carson and his scouts would be coming
to destroy the fruit trees which were neatly aligned
along irrigation ditches that the Spanish called acequia.
Woke feeling nauseous—my wife’s soft breathing
beside me. Outside the immense Sierra dark and silence,
a sky still glittering with a strew of stars, a faint brightening
to the east. You’d think, past sixty or so, the unconscious
would give you some respite. But here, it says,
is the little engine of dread and sorrow that runs your story.
And here, almost symmetrically, is the unspeakable cruelty
of the world. In an hour the market in Tahoma will open.
I can drive through the sugar pines. Get coffee,
get a paper. The plan today is to climb Ellis Peak
to see if we can’t find the clusters of golden berries
on the mountain ash that we saw last year where the slope
of the trail flattens and the creek runs in a silver sheet
across slabs of granite and then flares into spumes
of white water that leap down the canyon
in what John Muir thought was joy or its earthly simulation.
A good walk, mostly uphill. We can wear ourselves out with it.

Wearing Ourselves Into Silence: Reading Robert Hass as Meditation

The title itself is a meditation: John Muir, A Dream, A Waterfall, A Mountain Ash. It braids together human history, dream-memory, the violence of Kit Carson, the grandeur of Muir’s joy, and the fragile ash tree with its berries. Everything comes to the same: people, dreams, nature, death, and ash. The poem begins in the unconscious but flows, like the creek it describes, into daily life and then into silence.

Hass’s gift is to hold opposites together without forcing resolution. Beauty and brutality, serenity and dread, appear “almost symmetrically.” The unconscious offers no escape, only the same lesson: both comfort and cruelty live side by side. This echoes the insight that good and evil coexist, and who are we to judge—a truth Guru Nanak and Shakespeare each recognized in their own idioms.

And yet, Hass turns. After dread comes the ordinary: the market will open, there will be coffee, a newspaper, a drive through sugar pines. Then comes the plan for the day: a climb up Ellis Peak, to see berries, to walk uphill, to let the body labor. The creek will shimmer over granite, water will leap in white spumes. John Muir called such waters joy—or its “earthly simulation.”

Here Hass teaches us something deeper: meditation does not begin by fleeing the world, but by entering it so fully that we wear ourselves out. To walk uphill, to give ourselves to joyous effort, is to tire out the little engines of ego. We lose ourselves in the climb, in the silver sheet of water, in the rhythm of breathing. What begins in sorrow ends in silence, not because sorrow is erased but because we have surrendered the self that clings to it.

This is close to the Sikh movement from naad—sound, song, the rhythm of creation—to anhad naad, the soundless sound, as I have explored in what makes a song, a shabad, or poetry. We begin in words, in music, in the noisy self. We walk, we chant, we labor, until finally the self dissolves into the silence that underlies all sound. Hass’s poem mirrors this journey: from the trapped bat of the unconscious, to the cruelty of the world, to the ordinary consolations of markets and coffee, to the wearing-out of the self in a good uphill walk.

It is the same realization that came to me in Vacation of a Lifetime: that meditation is not confined to a secluded retreat, but discovered through living, walking, even exhausting ourselves into stillness. Hass, in his ordinary landscapes, offers the same teaching.

In this way, Robert Hass, the poet of memory and terrain, becomes also a guide to meditation. He shows that to lose ourselves in walking, in climbing, in water rushing over stone, is to find again the silence at the heart of things—the silence where song becomes no sound, where naad becomes anhad naad.

And if you’d like to feel this movement from sound to silence through music, listen to Guru Nanak’s Pavan Guru Pani Pita—a shabad that reminds us how air, water, and effort carry us toward the eternal rhythm.