• dogfish (♡)

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while (...) And anyway it’s the same old story — a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world. And look! look! look! I think those little fish better wake up and dash themselves away from the hopeless future that is bulging toward them. And probably, if they don’t waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it.

• morning poem (♡)

If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. (...) there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted — each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray

• the chance to love everything

I watched, trembling, sure I had heard the click of claws, the smack of lips outside my gauzy house — I imagined the red eyes, the broad tongue, the enormous lap. Would it be friendly too? Fear defeated me. And yet, not in faith and not in madness but with the courage I thought my dream deserved, I stepped outside. It was gone.

• trilliums

I believed in the world. Oh, I wanted to be easy in the peopled kingdoms, to take my place there, but there was none that I could find shaped like me (...) I listened to the earth-talk, the root-wrangle, the arguments of energy, the dreams lying just under the surface, then rising, becoming at the last moment flaring and luminous — the patient parable of every spring and hillside year after difficult year.

• wild geese (♡)

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. (...) 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.

• knife

It wasn’t about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by. Sometimes, when I sit like this, quiet, all the dreams of my blood and all outrageous divisions of time seem ready to leave, to slide out of me. Then, I imagine, I would never move.

• shadows

we lift them to our shoulders like so many black coffins, we continue walking into the future. I don’t mean there are no bodies in the river, or bones broken by the wind. I mean everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar of the tornado swears there was no mention ever of any person, or reason — I mean the waters rise without any plot upon history, or even geography. Whatever power of the earth rampages, we turn to it dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

• dreams

All night the dark buds of dreams open richly. In the center of every petal is a letter, and you imagine if you could only remember and string them all together they would spell the answer. It is a long night, and not an easy one — you have so many branches, and there are diversions — birds that come and go, the black fox that lies down to sleep beneath you, the moon staring with her bone-white eye.

• the river (♡)

Do dreams lie? (...) Once among the reeds I found a boat, as thin and lonely as a young tree. Nearby the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain. Home, I said. In every language there is a word for it. In the body itself, climbing those walls of white thunder, past those green temples, there is also a word for it. I said, home.

• consequences

Afterward I found under my left shoulder the most curious wound. As though I had leaned against some whirring thing, it bleeds secretly. Nobody knows its name. (...) How does any of us live in this world? One thing compensates for another, I suppose. Sometimes what’s wrong does not hurt at all, but rather shines like a new moon.

• robert schumann (♡)

Hardly a day passes I don’t think of him in the asylum: younger than I am now, trudging the long road down through madness toward death. Everywhere in this world his music explodes out of itself, as he could not. And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.

• clamming

we are all one family but love ourselves best. (...) How detailed and hopeful, how exact everything is in the light, on the rippling sand, at the edge of the turning tide — its upheaval — its stunning proposal — its black, anonymous roar.

• the fire

Those days I was willing, but frightened. What I mean is, I wanted to live my life but I didn’t want to do what I had to do to go on, which was: to go back.

• banyan

I’ll tell you a story about a seed. About a seed flying into a tree, and eating it little by little. About a small tree that becomes a huge tree and wants to travel. Listen, said the voice. This is your dream. I’m only stopping here for a little while. Don’t be afraid.

• whispers (♡)

have you ever turned on your shoulder helplessly, facing the white moon, crying let me in? have you dared to count the months as they pass and the years while you imagined pleasure, shining like honey, locked in some secret tree? (...) have you walked out in the mornings wherever you are in the world to consider all those gleaming and reasonless lives that flow outward and outward, easily, to the last moment the bulbs of their lungs, their bones and their appetites, can carry them? oh, have you looked wistfully into the flushed bodies of the flowers? have you stood, staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers where the birds like tossing fires flash through the trees, their bodies exchanging a certain happiness in the sleek, amazing humdrum of nature’s design — blood’s heaven, spirit’s haven, to which you cannot belong?

• members of the tribe

That time I wanted to die somebody was playing the piano in the room with me. It was Mozart. It was Beethoven. It was Bruckner. In the kitchen a man with one ear was painting a flower. (...) But I don’t forgive them for turning their faces away, for taking off their veils and dancing for death — for hurtling toward oblivion on the sharp blades of their exquisite poems, saying: this is the way (...) And the man who merely washed Michelangelo’s brushes, kneeling on the damp bricks, staring every day at the colors pouring out of them, lived to be a hundred years old.

• starfish (♡)

But I stayed there, I crouched on the stone wall while the sea poured its harsh song through the sluices, (...) What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what is easy? It never grew easy, but at last I grew peaceful: all summer my fear diminished as they bloomed through the water like flowers, like flecks of an uncertain dream, while I lay on the rocks, reaching into the darkness, learning little by little to love our only world.

• the journey (♡)

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations — though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.

• the house

what a change from the cramped room at the center where I began, where I crouched and was safe, but could hardly breathe! (...) I’m hinging the doors — once they are up they will lift their easy latches, they will open like wings

• stanley kunitz

But now I know more about the great wheel of growth, and decay, and rebirth, and know my vision for a falsehood. (...) Oh, what good it does the heart to know it isn’t magic! Like the human child I am I rush to imitate.

• orion

I love Orion, his fiery body, his ten stars, his flaring points of reference, his shining dogs. “It is winter,” he says. “We must eat,” he says. Our gloomy and passionate teacher. Miles below in the cold woods, with the mouse and the owl, with the clearness of water sheeted and hidden, with the reason for the wind forever a secret, he descends and sits with me, his voice like the snapping of bones. Behind him everything is so black and unclassical; behind him I don’t know anything, not even my own mind.

• one or two things (♡)

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever, (...) For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. “Don’t love your life too much,” it said, and vanished into the world.

• sunrise

and I thought how the sun blazes for everyone just so joyfully as it rises under the lashes of my own eyes, and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.

• storm in massachusetts, september 1982

I think of my good life, I think of other lives being blown apart in field after distant field. All over the world — I’m sure of it — life is much the same when it’s going well — resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster’s seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?

• acid

I carry it like a bead of acid to remember how, once in a while, you can creep out of your own life and become someone else — an explosion in that nest of wires we call the imagination.

• black snakes

One flowed under the leaves, the other flared half its length into the air against my body, then swirled away. Once I had steadied, I thought: how valiant! and I wished I had come softly, I wished they were my dark friends. For a moment I stared through the impossible gates.

• the moths

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped the pain was unbearable. If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved, the pain was unbearable. (...) You aren’t much, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond, and grinned.

• at sea

The haze has us in a slow, pink and gray confusion; everything we know — the horizon, for example, and the distant ridge of land — has vanished, the boat glides without a sound over a sea of curled and luminous glass, there are clouds in the sky wherever that is, and clouds in the water, and maybe we have entered heaven already, the happy boat sliding like a bee down the throat of a huge damp flower. Some birds, like streamers of white silk, approach us, crying. Ah, yes, how easy, how familiar it seems now, that long lovely thrusting up and down of wings.

• 1945-1985: poem for the anniversary (♡)

The way I’d like to go on living in this world wouldn’t hurt anything, I’d just go on walking uphill and downhill, looking around, and so what if half the time I don’t know what for —

• coming home (♡)

I imagine us seeing everything from another place — the top of one of the pale dunes or the deep and nameless fields of the sea — and what we see is the world that cannot cherish us but which we cherish, and what we see is our life moving like that, along the dark edges of everything. — the headlights like lanterns sweeping the blackness — believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things, looking out for sorrow, slowing down for happiness, making all the right turns right down to the thumping barriers to the sea, the swirling waves, the narrow streets, the houses, the past, the future, the doorway that belongs to you and me.