Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, January 4, 2009; BW12

Pretty much any spiritual practice, whether religious in the formal sense (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, etc.) or purely secular (counting breaths, a centering prayer), finds divinity in contemplation. To become fully alive, we must still our chaotic desires. The poems of Greek-born poet Tryfon Tolides work almost like mini-meditations, bringing us to a sweet, nameless emptiness.

Calling

Come to the point where, finally, you are lost,

wayside-sitting, wind-gazing, train-whistle-listening,

if you want to converse with the invisible presence,

continual, sustained, indwelling, be lost,

be abandoned, so that the heart, the mind, as big

as God, come to the place where you are lost,

so that all your days and the shuttering of each day's

light and the blue magnetic incomprehensible

jumping and motionless blue of twilight and the fine

blackening after, around the incomprehensible

waiting and breathing of trees with their delight-inducing

cloud-depths and freedom-shapes and darting birds,

happen in pure glory, in ineffable joy of consciousness,

so that your senses overfill to muteness,

so that mere being becomes the form of your praise.

Often, Tolides finds communion with elemental forces. In this meditation, fire not only destroys but clarifies. Time can do that, too, burning us down to a more soulful state. Here's an untitled poem by Tolides that explores that idea:

The fire is now so sweet I will not leave the room,

I have spun and spun it all day to its rightness and am

now deflatedly proud.

The heat is so steady, the small logs burn so slowly in

the stove.

They go on burning after they are burned, burned

glowing whole remnants,

After smoke, hissing, last breaths, crackles, some blue

reserve flared

From under the bark, a wind, they become x-rays of

great detail of their former selves,

brittle refinement of surface chafe and molten-like core,

more gone and more alive,

striations of woodflesh only visible in darkness, pure fuel

now

heading for the fineness of ash. I will not answer the

phone. I am waiting

only for the rain now, to seal me more perfectly. And for

nothing,

which has arrived; we'll greet the rain together. Some

sweetness, some silence,

has descended upon me and I can say: now.

"Calling" and "The fire is now so sweet" have not been published. They have been used by permission of the author.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."