Counseling Kevin

I Am Not Ready For The Storm

The Storm by Theodore Roethke

1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

The Passage We Did Not Take

Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.
--T.S. Eliot

I loved you
--Alexander Pushkin

I loved you, and I probably still do,
And for a while the feeling may remain...
But let my love no longer trouble you,
I do not wish to cause you any pain.
I loved you; and the hopelessness I knew,
The jealousy, the shyness - though in vain -
Made up a love so tender and so true
As may God grant you to be loved again

****************************************************************

And as the lights go dim
I lie down with him
And as I'm lying there
I can only smell your hair

I Cast For Comfort

I hate it when the past won't stay buried.

My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather - as skies
Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Only My Heart Makes Answer

Journey by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me—I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and sighed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.
Yet onward!
Cat birds call
Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Only my heart, only my heart responds.
Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs—
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road
A gateless garden, and an open path:
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.

The Work For Which All Other Is Merely Preparation

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
---R. M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Hall & Oates, Adult Education

Could I Hold You?

Despair
--Anthony Hecht

Sadness. The moist gray shawls of drifting sea-fog,
Salting scrub pine, drenching the cranberry bogs,
Erasing all but foreground, making a ghost
Of anyone who walks softly away;
And the faint, penitent psalmody of the ocean.

Gloom. It appears among the winter mountains
On rainy days. Or the tiled walls of the subway
In caged and aging light, in the steel scream
And echoing vault of the departing train,
The vacant platform, the yellow destitute silence.

But despair is another matter. Midafternoon
Washes the worn bank of a dry arroyo,
Its ocher crevices, unrelieved rusts,
Where a startled lizard pauses, nervous, exposed
To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine.

City Lights
--Sara Bareilles

There Will Come A Day

Put Out My Eyes
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,
Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
And without any feet can go to you;
And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
And if you set this brain of mine afire,
Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.

“Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.”
--Golda Meir

Hope
--Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
      That perches in the soul,
      And sings the tune without the words,
      And never stops at all,

      And sweetest in the gale is heard;
      And sore must be the storm
      That could abash the little bird
      That kept so many warm.

      I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
      And on the strangest sea;
      Yet, never, in extremity,
      It asked a crumb of me.       

The Pull of the Moon

Moon dips his finger
Into Ocean's frigid deep,
Sends waves surging home.

Alison Krauss and Union Station - If I Didn't Know Any Better

Counting The Beats

 

Counting the Beats

---Robert Graves

You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day;
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?

Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.    

Twenty-four years ago this month my sister died of breast cancer, on Martha's Vineyard. Three months later, my wife and I returned to the Vineyard in the dead of a hard winter to check on my brother-in-law and their three young children. One night, a group of us - my wife, brother-in-law, and friends who had comforted and cared for the family through that sad time - plowed through the snow in my brother-in-law's Volkswagen van to the local American Legion post to listen to a band fronted by James Taylor's brother Livingston, the drummer for which was (as was his wife) a good friend of my sister's family. The band was mellow and tight, and the music was bittersweet. We all drank and laughed and healed together.

Livingston, James, and all the members of the Taylor family (including brothers Hugh and the late Alex) sounded strikingly similar, and I can never listen to James without whatever song he's singing (even accompanied by a video set in the desert) evoking strong memories of my sister, the Vineyard, dark nights, blue water, loss, grief and moving on.

The grief never ends, nor should it. You don't wallow in it, but you never cease to feel it. The day you do, you might as well cease breathing.

Enough To Be On Your Way -- James Taylor

Sometimes the sky's too bright,
        Or has too many clouds or birds,
        And far away's too sharp a sun
        To nourish thinking of him.
        Why is my hand too blunt
        To cut in front of me
        My horrid images for me,
        Of over-fruitful smiles,
        The weightless touching of the lip
        I wish to know
        I cannot lift, but can,
        The creature with the angel's face
        Who tells me hurt,
        And sees my body go
        Down into misery?
        No stopping. Put the smile
        Where tears have come to dry.
        The angel's hurt is left;
        His telling burns.      

Sometimes a woman's heart has salt,
        Or too much blood;
        I tear her breast,
        And see the blood is mine,
        Flowing from her, but mine,
        And then I think
        Perhaps the sky's too bright;
        And watch my hand,
        But do not follow it,
        And feel the pain it gives,
        But do not ache.
       ---Dylan Thomas

The Blower's Daughter --Damien Rice
       

Most Wounds Are Self-Inflicted

Sometimes the sky's too bright,
        Or has too many clouds or birds,
        And far away's too sharp a sun
        To nourish thinking of him.
        Why is my hand too blunt
        To cut in front of me
        My horrid images for me,
        Of over-fruitful smiles,
        The weightless touching of the lip
        I wish to know
        I cannot lift, but can,
        The creature with the angel's face
        Who tells me hurt,
        And sees my body go
        Down into misery?
        No stopping. Put the smile
        Where tears have come to dry.
        The angel's hurt is left;
        His telling burns.      

Sometimes a woman's heart has salt,
        Or too much blood;
        I tear her breast,
        And see the blood is mine,
        Flowing from her, but mine,
        And then I think
        Perhaps the sky's too bright;
        And watch my hand,
        But do not follow it,
        And feel the pain it gives,
        But do not ache.
       ---Dylan Thomas

The Blower's Daughter --Damien Rice