i river

"I river to keep my banks apart."
 - George Quasha
the eros of soft exterior shocks: preverbs



Change
But start slowly, because direction is more important than speed.
Sit in another chair, on the other side of the table.
Later on, change tables.
When you go out, try to walk on the other side of the street. Then change your route, walk calmly down other streets, observing closely the places you pass by.
Take other buses. Change your wardrobe for a while; give away your old shoes and try to walk barefoot for a few days - even if only at home.
Take off a whole afternoon to stroll about freely, listening to the birds or the noise of the cars.
Open and shut the drawers and doors with your left hand.
Sleep on the other side of the bed. Then try sleeping in other beds.
Watch other TV programs, read other books, live other romances - even if only in your imagination.
Sleep until later. Go to bed earlier.
Learn a new word a day.
Eat a little less, eat a little more, eat differently; choose new seasonings, new colors,
things you have never dared to experiment.
Lunch in other places, go to other restaurants, order another kind of drink
and buy bread at another bakery.
Lunch earlier, have dinner later, or vice-versa.
Try something new every day: a new side, a new method, a new flavor,
a new way, a new pleasure, a new position.
Pick another market, another make of soap, another toothpaste.
Take a bath at different times of the day.
Use pens with different colors.
Go and visit other places.
Love more and more and in different ways. Even when you think that the other will be frightened, suggest what you have always dreamed about doing when you make love.
Change your bag, your wallet, your suitcases, buy new glasses, write other poems.
Open an account in another bank, go to other cinemas, other hairdressers,
other theaters, visit new museums.
Change. And think seriously of finding another job, another activity,
work that is more like what you expect from life, more dignified, more human.
If you cannot find reasons to be free, invent them: be creative.
And grab the chance to take a long, enjoyable trip - preferably without any destination.
Try new things. Change again. Make another change. Experiment something else.
You will certainly know better things and worse things than those you already know, but that does not matter. What matters most is change, movement, dynamism, energy.
Only what is dead does not change -  and you are alive.
 - Clarice Lispector



"Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know."
 - Lauren Oliver
Before I Fall



"I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand."
 - Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man



The Day You Are Reading This
The planet of Nothing fills the sky, and
a philosopher goes out and admires that
greatest of all discoveries in the heavens.

Even the rest of us, now and then we
fall outward and on into that glorious
hole where all of us really are.

But mostly we look steadily at the
stars, and when we meet someone
we say, "Have a good day."
 - William Stafford



The End
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
 - Mark Strand
The Continuous Life



"We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day."
 - Brad Meltzer



All Winter
In winter I remember
how the white snow
swallowed those who came before me.
They sing from the earth.
This is what happened to the voices.
They have gone underground.

I remember how the man named Fire
carried a gun. I saw him
burning.
His ancestors live in the woodstove
and cry at night and are broken.
This is what happens to fire.
It consumes itself.

In the coldest weather, I recall
that I am in every creature
and they are in me.
My bones feel their terrible ache
and want to fall open
in fields of vanished mice
and horseless hooves.

And I know how long it takes
to travel the sky,
for buffalo are still living
across the drifting face of the moon.

These nights the air is full of spirits.
They breathe on windows.
They are the ones that leave fingerprints
on glass when they point out
the things that happen,
the things we might forget.
 - Linda Hogan
Savings



Sayings from the Northern Ice
It is people at the edge who say things
at the edge: winter is toward knowing.

Sled runners before they meet have long talk apart.
There is a pup in every litter the wolves will have.
A knife that falls points at an enemy.
Rocks in the wind know their place: down low.
Over your shoulder is God; the dying deer sees Him.

At the mouth of the long sack we fall in forever
storms brighten the spikes of the stars.

Wind that buried bear skulls north of here
and beats moth wings for help outside the door
is bringing bear skull wisdom, but do not ask the skull
too large a question until summer.
Something too dark was held in that strong bone.

Better to end with a lucky saying:

Sled runners cannot decide to join or to part.
When they decide, it is a bad day.
 - William Stafford
The Way It Is



from Light: Winter
Winter is out for a lot this year
the beach already is stiff
all will be one will be one this year
wings and ice will be one in the world
all will be changed in the world:
the boat will hear its steps on the ice
the war will hear its war on the ice
the woman will hear her hour on the ice
the hour of birth in the ice of death
winter is out for a lot.
Out for the houses the cities
out for the forests the clouds
the mountains the valleys fear
the heart the children peace.

Winter is out for a lot this year
the hand already is stiff
the crying of children is heard in the house
one will we be one life
I hear my house slip with the world
and scream all that has been screamed
the heart rams its boat into ice
shells rustling in the hull
winter is out for as much.

If I freeze fast in the ice
if you freeze fast my child
my great forest next summer
my great fear as I come
if you freeze fast my life:
then I am a vulture of wings and ice
tearing my liver, my living life
awake in eternity.

This winter is in for a lot.
 - Inger Christensen
translated by Susanna Nied

<°))))><

"Our brains evolved in such a way as to render us all eager but flawed mind readers. Whenever we see each other, we try to figure out what other people are thinking; it is a necessary skill in a deeply social species - or, rather, we are a deeply social species precisely because we have this skill. We try to read each other by look, posture, expression, gesture. And, to make things more complicated (and/or fun), we know this about each other, so we also try deliberately to produce certain readings in others by feigning certain looks, postures, expressions and gestures. All the world's a stage - and the world we have created includes millions of actual stages, where actors embody the principle that all the world's a (self-reflexive) stage."
 - Michael Bérubé



"Who can blame you for thinking you deserve the credit? The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito."
 - David Eagleman



Sending These Messages
Over these writings I bent my head.
Now you are considering them. If you
turn away I will look up: a bridge
that was there will be gone.
For the rest of your life I will stand here,
reaching across.
If these writings can bring a turn
or an echo that touches you - maybe
a face, a slant, a tune - you will stop
too and bend over them. When you
look up, your thought will reach
wherever I am.
I know it is strange. and there is no measure
for this. The only connection we make
is like a twinge when sometimes they change
the beat in music, and we sprawl with it
and hear another world for a minute
that is almost there.
 - William Stafford



"The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out of all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather."
 - Frederick Buechner



"To bless whatever there is, and for no other reason but simply because it is - that is our raison d'etre; that is what we are made for as human beings. This singular command is engraved in our heart. Whether we understand this or not matters little. Whether we agree or disagree makes no difference. And in our heart of hearts we know it."
 - David Steindl-Rast
Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer



One Way In
This is how I hold my place in the world:
one line at a time, counting beats until
they come out right, chasing the sound of words
the way a dog chases cars to get her fill.

And this is how I fill my days: I slip
the ink across the page - a second skin -
and leave behind the color that my lips
print on the glass, a way of coming in.

This is how I stay in view: I take down
everything exactly how I see it,
I say it one way then turn it around
to see if there's another way it fits.

I hollow out a page to make a nest,
I stretch the pen out like a branch and rest.
 - Joyce Sutphen
Modern Love & Other Myths



"As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream."
 - Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot



words under pressure bleed original sense
The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home.

I make what calls me out.
All gone before you know it.

Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again.
Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can't stay still.

To unmask is to go silent.

Language makes no promise to communicate.

An articulated sound has its own dream in the ear.
Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice.

Now she's ready to draw eros from foreign bodies.
It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt.

By she I mean who speaking animate configures.
This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through.

Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.
 - George Quasha
speaking animate: preverbs



"We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously."
 - Frederick Buechner



Ultimate Problems
In the Aztec design God crowds
into the little pea that is rolling
out of the picture.
All the rest extends bleaker
because God has gone away.

In the White Man design, though,
no pea is there.
God is everywhere,
but hard to see.

The Aztecs frown at this.
How do you know He is everywhere?
And how did He get out of the pea?
 - William Stafford

><((((º>

"You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine."
  -  Wallace Stegner
Crossing to Safety



"The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself."
 - C. JoyBell C.



"For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord."
 - G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown



I know
it's stupid to not own a gun yet have

so many triggers, but in some other world
gigantic seashells hold humans

to their ears and listen to the echo
of machines.
 - Jeffrey McDaniel



"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."
 - Vladimir Nabokov



Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window . . .
To say them more intensely than the Things themselves
Ever dreamed of existing.
 - Rilke



Nights Our House Comes to Life
Some nights in midwinter when the creek clogs
With ice and the spines of fir trees stiffen
Under a blank, frozen sky,
On these nights our house comes to life.
It happens when you're half asleep:
A sudden crack, a fractured dream, you bolting
Upright - but all you can hear is the clock
Your great-grandfather found in 1860
And smuggled here from Dublin for his future bride,
A being as unknown to him then as she is now
To you, a being as distant as the strangers
Who built this house, and died in this room
Some cold, still night, like tonight,
When all that was heard were the rhythmic clicks
Of a pendulum, and something, barely audible,
Moving on the dark landing of the attic stairs.
 - Matthew Brennan
The House with the Mansard Roof



"I interviewed a woman who is terminally ill. So I tried to delicately ask, "What is it like to wake up every morning and know that you are dying?" "Well," she responded, "What is it like to wake up every morning and pretend that you are not?"
 - Marc Chernoff



"At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the center of all the possible magic and revelation."
 - Ted Hughes



"And that's how we measure out our real respect for people - by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate - and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you."
 - Ted Hughes

<°))))><

"I should be at peace. I have understood. Don't some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and triumph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys . . . "
 - Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum

"I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet - worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others."
 - Lewis Thomas



Writing in the Afterlife
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible -
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles -
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us -

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.
 - Billy Collins



"And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer."
 - Mary Oliver
West Wind



"But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."
 - John Green
Paper Towns



The Almanac of Last Things
From the almanac of last things
I choose the spider lily
for the grace of its brief
blossom, though I myself
fear brevity,

but I choose The Song of Songs
because the flesh
of those pomegranates
has survived
all the frost of dogma.

I choose January with its chill
lessons of patience and despair - and
August, too sun-struck for lessons.
I choose a thimbleful of red wine
to make my heart race,

then another to help me
sleep. From the almanac
of last things I choose you,
as I have done before.
And I choose evening

because the light clinging
to the window
is at its most reflective
just as it is ready
to go out.
 - Linda Pastan
Carnival Evening



Down in the Mines
For I am one who exists from the undivided,
He said, and am filled with light.
And darkness is over there,
                                             where the divided stand.

Tough words, Ace, tough words.
White clouds grow big along the ridge line.
Under the earth we're far away from home,
                                                                      or closer to it.
 - Charles Wright



The Chance
The blue-black mountains are etched
with ice. I drive south in fading light.
The lights of my car set out before
me, and disappear before my very eyes.
And as I approach thirty, the distances
are shorter than I guess? The mind
travels at the speed of light. But for
how many people are the passions
ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?
Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman,
who sells himself a policy on his own life;
or the magician who has himself locked
in a chest and thrown into the sea,
only to discover he is caught in his own chains.
I want a passion that grows and grows.
To feel, think, act, and be defined
by your actions, thoughts, feelings.
As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray,
I want the clear white light to work
against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:
even if the darkness precedes and follows
us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.
 - Arthur Sze
The Redshifting Web



"We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value."
 - Iris Murdoch



Poem to My Daughter
The sky has, is, one exit, one excuse,
and if I'm dead now that I'm saying this,
I can't vouch for my transition from life
as having been rough or even evident.
Have I tried turning it off and then on again?
Have I tried throwing it against the wall?
Getting to know you, getting to know all
about you getting the mirror to mean
not only me, and thinking I must look
dumber than I look - dumber, then, than prose -
I walk through the laundry room regretting
getting the weekend done this way, as if
backstage, and say the name of your birthplace
as if I'd lost a hundred dollars there,
which I may have … Dear, when nowhere, don't do
as those of us in nowhere do - just go.
 - Graham Foust

><((((º>

"When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again."
 - Lynda Barry



"Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this "something" cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It's what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours."
 - Robert Fulghum



Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.

I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
 - Charles Wright
Reunion
Country Music



"Despite everything, we are good people, who can hardly live in this world that continues almost entirely at our expense. The best thing is to keep on moving arms and legs, and watch the waves, almost as though moving forward. In this way, despair turns quickly over to happiness, and back to despair again. And, if you reach the beach, walk back across it like everything is fine, toward your family who would not like to see the abyss you have just swum over."
 - Joanna Walsh



"Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told."
 - Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Wind



"The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put us at ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises - a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods."
 - John Updike
Self-Consciousness



After
There is one thing certain.
Once you have stood
in the midst of that
searing flame,
been struck down
to earth
like a pilgrim
entered by light at last
and have lain there,
waiting,
not quite certain -

how can you ever know again
what it is
not to be blinded by the light,
never to have gone there
to the top of the snow hung peak
and felt that nameless something
descend onto your shoulders,
your breast,
even as you bent forward
in disbelief.
 - Dorothy Walters



"I have yet to figure out what life is really all about, and I doubt that I will ever come up with the answer. I do find a certain fascination with the unpredictable. The transitory years we wade through are what they are - what we make of them. I'm still happy to be here, and I'm clever enough to know that my date of departure remains time's secret. I trust time. It has been my friend for a long while, and we have been through a lot together."
 - Gordon Parks
Voices in the Mirror



"Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it."
 - Yukio Mishima
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea



"Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."
 - John Cage

<°))))><

"What is the you you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images."
 - Roland Barthes



The jonquils. They come back. They split the earth with
their green swords, bearing cups of light.
The forsythia comes back, spraying its thin whips with
blossom, one loud yellow shout.
The robins. They come back. They pull the sun on the
silver thread of their song.
The irises come back. They dance in the soft air in silken
gowns of midnight blue.
The lilacs come back. They trail their perfume like a scarf
of violet chiffon.
And the leaves come back, on every tree and bush, millions
and millions of small green hands applauding your return.
 - Barbara Crooker
For a Friend Lying in Intensive Care Waiting for Her White Blood Cells to Rejuvenate After a Bone Marrow Transplant
Selected Poems



Stalking the Poem
1
Only one word will do. It isn't on the tip of your tongue, but you know it's not far. It's the one fish that won't swim into your net, a figure that hides in a crowd of similar figures, a domino stone in the face-down pool. Your need to find it becomes an obsession, single-minded and relentless as lust. It's a long time before you can free yourself, let it go. "Forget it," you say, and think that you do. When the word is sure you have forgotten it, it comes out of hiding. But it isn't taking any chances even now and has prepared its appearance with care. It surrounds itself with new and inconspicuous friends and faces you in a line up in which everyone looks equally innocent. Of course you know it instantly, the way Joan of Arc knew the Dauphin and Augustine knew God. You haven't been so happy in weeks. You rush the word to your poem, which had died for lack of it, and it arises pink-cheeked as Lazarus. The two of you share the wine.

2
You've got the poem cornered. It gives up, lies down, plays dead. No more resistance. How easily you could take it into your teeth and walk off with it! But you are afraid of the sound they will make crunching the bones. You are afraid of the taste of blood, of the poem's dark, unknown insides. So you stand above it, sniffing its fur, poking and pushing it, turning it over. Suddenly you see that its eyes are open and that they stare at you with contempt. You walk away with your tail between your legs. When you return, the poem has disappeared.

3
The poem is complete in your head, its long, lovely shape black against the white space in your mind. Each line is there, secure, recallable, pulled forth by the line before it and the one before that, like a melody whose second part you can sing once you have sung the first, but not before. All there, all perfectly linked. But when you pick up the pen, the shape dissolves, pales, spreads into slovenliness. You feel the poem escaping; you can't write fast enough. By some miracle you recover all the bits and pieces, and you manage to put them in proper order. You have been saved, you think. But the poem is not the beautiful figure you held in your mind. It is gawky and gap-toothed, its arms are too long for its body, its clothes don't fit. It looks up at you from the page accusingly. Look at the mess you've made, it says. See what you can do with me: last chance, don't blow it. Filled with gratitude, you roll up your sleeves and go to work.
 - Lisel Mueller
Alive Together



"We cannot see the dark, but we can see in the dark. Black does not exist, it is merely the absence of something else. The eye perceives rays, we don't see objects, we don't see other people, we don't see the world, we see only the light that they reflect. I don't see you, only the light that collides with your body in the morning and ricochets back, to me. I catch it, all of it. We are born into light, and throughout our entire lives this is what we see, we pry open our eyes, and all we can see is light."
 - Frøydis Sollid Simonsen
from Every Morning I Crawl Out of the Ocean
translated by Becky L. Crook



Where Is God?
It's as if what is unbreakable -
the very pulse of life - waits for
everything else to be torn away,
and then in the bareness that
only silence and suffering and
great love can expose, it dares
to speak through us and to us.

It seems to say, if you want to last,
hold on to nothing. If you want
to know love, let in everything.
If you want to feel the presence
of everything, stop counting the
things that break along the way.
 - Mark Nepo



"All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems - all these are mainly disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow."
 - G. K. Chesterton



"Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt."
 - Shūsaku Endō
Silence



This is not a season
but a pause
between one future & another,
a day after a day,
a breathing space before death,
a breathing, the rain

throwing itself down out of the
bluegrey sky, clear joy.
 - Margaret Atwood
from Rain
True Stories



Icelandic Hurricane
"No earth tremor, but a skyquake. Turner could have painted it, secured by ropes. A single mitten whirled past right now, several miles from its hand. Facing the storm I am heading for that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am being x-rayed, my skeleton hands in its application for discharge. Panic grows while I tack about, I am wrecked, I am wrecked and drown on dry land! How heavy it is, all that I suddenly have to carry, how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final bout of wrestling with the door. And now inside. Behind the huge window-pane. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is - to be close without being stricken . . . Outside a horde of transparent splinters of gigantic shapes rush across the lava plain. But I flutter no more. I sit behind the glass, still, my own portrait."
 - Tomas Tranströmer
The Blue House
translated by Göran Malmqvist


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