I'm Going To Start Living Like A Mystic

The day is nearly done and I forgot it's the birthday of poet Edward Hirsch,

born in Chicago on this day in 1950.

 

In his best-selling book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (1999).

He said: "Read ... poems to yourself in the middle of the night. 

Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you.

Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. 

Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. 

These poems have come from a great distance to find you."

Here's a poem by Edward Hirsch

"I'm Going to Start Living Like a Mystic":

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage — silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.