Sometimes our shadows shiver without us. Sometimes tomorrow falls on yesterday. This is not about the reefs of stars our hopes are dashed upon, not our splintered skies, however true, though one story always reflects another. I mean, this had nothing to do with memory, which is never enough. Our lives are just a sideshow here.
Richard Jackson, from “Negative Capability,” Out of Place: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)
Time to rest now; you have had enough excitement of the time being.
Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies in the room, flickering here and there, here and there, and summer’s deep sweetness filling the open window.
Don’t think of these things anymore. Listen to my breathing, your own breathing like the fireflies, each small breath a flare in which the world appears.
I’ve sung to you long enough in the summer night. I’ll win you over in the end; the world can’t give you this sustained vision.
You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps
everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless
that wants our love.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not
deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” ― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the
Medusa
“And in the book I read: God is love. But lifting my head, I do not find it so. Shall I return to my book and, between print, wander an air heavy with the scent of this one world? Or not trust language, only the blows that life gives me, wearing them like those red tokens with which an agreement is sealed?”
— R.S. Thomas, “Which,” Laboratories of the Spirits (MacMillan, 1975)
I stared at a tree against dusk Till it was a girl Standing beside a country road Shucking cane with her teeth.
She looked up & smiled
& waved. Lost in what hurts,
In what tasted good, could she
Ever learn there’s no love
In sugar?
—Yusef Komunyakaa, closing lines to “Sugar,” from Magic City (Wesleyan University Press, 1992)
“Sometimes when I write, when Chopin or Schubert twirls from a disc, when a line of poetry is perfectly good, the Mystery is inside me again. I lie down in the silence of my mind and touch the world all over. Clouds fly through me. Trees break the sky above a frozen lake, and a footprint startles its crust of snow.”
— Kate Daniels, from “Self-Portrait with Religion and Poetry,” A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (Louisana State University Press, 2010)
