or press an ear against its hive.

              I say drop a mouse into a poem
              and watch him probe his way out,

              or walk inside the poem's room
              and feel the walls for a light switch.

              I want them to waterski
              across the surface of a poem
              waving at the author's name on the shore.

              But all they want to do
              is tie the poem to a chair with rope
              and torture a confession out of it.

              They begin beating it with a hose
              to find out what it really means. 

Giving to all beings what they require
without claiming to be equitable;
Eternally performing good works,
without claiming to be charitable;
Existing before the beginning,
without claiming to be venerable;
Embracing and supporting the universe,
without claiming to be powerful.
It is in You that I move.

--- Xu You  Suggested to my consciousness by Dale Rhodes. 

My mind was becoming decrepit
So I took up calculus
Exercises to refresh it.
At first it was fun,
But all the problems 
Always came out one
Or minus one
Or the square-root of one
Or the other.
It got to be a bore.
I longed for answers of seven and three tenths
Or one hundred and thirty-four
Or even plain old two.
In my youth I took these things seriously.
No wonder my life went askew,
Having learned imaginary 
Numbers could resolve 
Real problems
I imagined 
The converse is also true. 

This poem was published sometime in the 1960's by a group called (I believe) The Palo Alto Poets.  I have been unable to locate the poet. 

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes--
Some have got broken--and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. 

There are enough
Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week--
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. 

Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot deep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. 

But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much more narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. 

To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;

Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. 

So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."

They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. 

In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, 
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. 

When love is felt or fear is known, 
When holidays and holy days and such times come, 
When anniversaries arrive by calendar or consciousness, 
When seasons come, as seasons do, old and known, but somehow new, 
When lives are born or people die, 
When something sacred’s sensed in soil or sky, 
Mark the time. 
Respond with thought or prayer, or smile, or grief. 
Let nothing living, life or leaf, slip between the fingers of the mind, 
Mark the time well; rejoice; sing Alleluia.
 

Other versions appear in sermons on the internet and as a reading in Singing the Living Tradition.

    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 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.

Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone's
Refusal.  It does not fall.  It fills.  It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow.  River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot 
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

                                anyone lived in a pretty how town
                                (with up so floating many bells down)
                                spring summer autumn winter
                                he sang his didn't he danced his did

                                Women and men (both little and small)
                                cared for anyone not at all
                                they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
                                sun moon stars rain

                                children guessed (but only a few
                                and down they forgot as up they grew
                                autumn winter spring summer)
                                that noone loved him more by more

                                when by now and tree by leaf
                                she laughed his joy she cried his grief
                                bird by snow and stir by still
                                anyone's any was all to her

                                someones married their everyones
                                laughed their cryings and did their dance
                                (sleep wake hope and then) they
                                said their nevers they slept their dream

                                stars rain sun moon
                                (and only the snow can begin to explain
                                how children are apt to forget to remember
                                with up so floating many bells down)

                                one day anyone died i guess
                                (and noone stooped to kiss his face)
                                busy folk buried them side by side
                                little by little and was by was

                                all by all and deep by deep
                                and more by more they dream their sleep
                                noone and anyone earth by april
                                wish by spirit and if by yes.