Sedona -- Pull over

I haven’t posted any poems lately, so let’s read some Mary Oliver. With it are some pictures of a scene that required me to pull the car over and capture the morning sky near Sedona, Arizona. Then I had to find a path and walk down to river that carved out the valley, and enjoy some tree tops and bottoms. And watch the trees and rocks dancing together.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, 2004

If you’d like to hear Mary Oliver reading this poem, click here.

And if you want to see wild geese — scroll down.

Across the Beatles Universe

Several weeks ago I posted some images from the Southwest together with lyrics from Joni Mitchell. I just rewatched Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and so some Beatles lyrics have inspired me, and I’ve got images from a hike on the Devil’s Hall trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in west Texas to accompany them.

John Lennon said the opening lines to the song came to him after an argument with his first wife Cynthia and her words flowing over him, and he went downstairs to write:

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

He said in an interview:

"It's one of the best lyrics I've written. In fact, it could be the best. It's good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewin' it. See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words, without melody. They don't have to have any melody, like a poem, you can read them."

I remember being surprised in coming across the Lennon-McCartney lyrics for A Day in the Life in an anthology in a college poetry class. Lennon said the line above was inspired by a photograph he saw in a London paper about a Guinness heiress who killed herself in a car crash, and the mundane nature of covering such a story. In only a few years images of him killed outside his New York home would echo back to these lyrics.

The image is of smoke from a fire that closed most of the trails in the park. In many ways the images of fires, floods, draught and destruction sometimes become just another mundane news story.

Well, it’s not a beetle, but coming across this centipede on the trail was a surprise. Paul McCartney’s lyrics he’d started for a different song were plugged into the middle of Lennon’s in A Day in the Life. If you have a Hulu subscription, you must see McCartney 3, 2, 1. You’ll need to wait until the very last episode, but McCartney’s recall of the creation of this song and inspiring orchestration is mesmerizing.

Ringo Starr might not be the lyrical genius of Lennon or McCartney, but he wrote a few treasures himself. This image is near the end of the Devil’s Hall trail and the entrance into the Hall by some natural stairs.

I’ll end this post with a photo from the end of the hike when we were greeted by a Canyon Wren, and a verse from one of Lennon and McCartney’s greatest.