Memorable Book Quotes Part 6: Poetry Edition

"Dew Light"

"Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age"

Excerpt from "Theft of Morning"

"I watch palm flowers open
pink coral in midair
among pleated cloud-green fans
as I sit for a while after breakfast
reading a few pages
with a shadowing sense
that I am stealing the moment
from something else
that I ought to be doing
so the pleasure of stealing is part of it"

Excerpt from "Beginners"

"As though it had always been forbidden to remember
each of us grew up
knowing nothing about the beginning"

Excerpt from "Looking up in the Garden"

"where will the meanings be
when the words are forgotten

will I see again
where you are"

Excerpt from "Another to Echo"

"How beautiful you must be
to have been able to lead me
this far with only
the sound of your going away"

Excerpt from "On a Distant Shore"

"I turned to the room
and in the light from the street
beheld one beautiful
bare breast of a friend's friend
gently rising and falling
as though I were not there
already not there"

Excerpt from "After the Voices"

"I have no way of telling what I miss
I am the only one who misses it"

"Long After Light"

"Small roads written in sleep in the foothills
how long ago and I believed you were lost
as I saw the bronze deepening in the light
and the shy moss turning to itself holding
its own brightness above the badger's path
while a single crow sailed west without a sound
and yet we trust without giving it a thought
that we will always see it as we see it once
and that what we know is only
a moment of what is ours and will
always be ours we believe it as
the moment flows away out of reach
and lengthening shadows merge in the valley
and one window kindles there like a first star
what we see again will come to us in secret
and without even knowing that we are here"

Excerpt from "Elegy for a Walnut Tree"

"all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world"

Excerpt from "Wild Oats"

"In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree"

"The Wonder of the Imperfect"

"Nothing that I do is finished
so I keep returning to it
lured by the notion that I long
to see the whole of it at last
completed and estranged from me

but no the unfinished is what
I return to as it leads me on
I am made whole by what has just
escaped me as it always does
I am made of incompleteness
the words are not there in words

oh gossamer gossamer breath
moment daylight life untouchable
by no name with no beginning

what do we think we recognize"

Excerpt from "Natural History of Forgetting"

"When I was me I remembered

I could remember what was not there
but may have been there
once"

Excerpt from "The Prow of the Ark"

"What I remember I cannot tell
though it is there in all that I say"

Excerpts from "Blue Hour"

"Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments."

"You see, one can live without having survived."

"Here, where there was almost nothing, we waited in the birch-lit clouds, holding the uncertain hand of a lost spirit."

Excerpt from "Curfew"

"The child asked if the bones in the wall
Belonged to the lights in the tunnel
Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven."

"Just because these tears were on your face
doesn't mean they're yours.
The tree in your mind

is mine.
The redistribution of tears
reflects our collective commitment

to storm and stress,
to attitudes befitting participants in sports

and sports writing.
The conventions governing weeping in novels
do not apply to weeping done on-camera

or in teams.
Eldest sons dispossessed of ancestral tears
mock the tears of the nouveaux riches.
You call that weeping?

We call it sports entertainment
because the loser gets paid more,
because losing is hazardous,
because hazards are for losers

in the collective economy
of variable stars.

Rational actors wearing wrestling masks
would chose to lose collectively,
to collectivize losing
in the service industry.

I perform a valuable service
(I lose)
and I work from home.

Am I not then entitled to drink six beers
and watch some losing gracefully performed?"


"Formalism is the belief that the eye does violence to the object it apprehends.
All formalisms are therefore sad.
A negative formalism acknowledges the violence intrinsic to its method.
Formalism is therefore a practice, not an essence.

For example, a syllogism subjected to a system of substitutions
allows us to apprehend the experience of logic
at logic's expense.

Negative formalisms catalyze an experience of structure.
The experience of structure is sad,
but, by revealing the contingency of content,
it authorizes hope.

This is the role of the artwork--to authorize hope,
but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its fulfillment.
The value of hope is that it has no use value.
Hope is the saddest of formalisms."


"Violence is not yet modern; it fails to acknowledge the limits of its medium."


"Ignorance that sees itself is elegy."


"Angels are absences in the snow, visible only from above. When it thaws they will stand up and search for the children they have known."


"Confusing the desire to display affection with affection, we applaud the veterans of an imaginary conflict with real victims. An immoderate reverence for tradition guides everything but our reading. I throw my own party and go away."

Excerpt from "After"

"The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins."

"Flowering Vetch"

"Each of the tragedies can be read
as the tale of a single ripening self,
every character part of one soul.
The comedies can be included in this as well.
Often the flaw is a flaw of self-knowledge;
sometimes greed. For this reason
the comic glint of a school of herring leads to no plot line,
we cannot imagine a tragedy of donkeys or bees.
Before the ordinary realities, ordinary failures:
hunger, coldness, anger, longing, heat.
Yet, one day, a thought as small as a vetch flower opens.
After, no longer minding the minor and almost wordless role,
playing the messenger given the letter
everyone knows will arrive too late or ruined by water.
To have stopped by the fig and eaten was not an error, then,
but the reason for going."

"Sky: An Assay"

"A hawk flies through it, carrying
a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.
Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it.
The sky makes room, adjusting its airy shoulders.
Sky doesn't age or remember,
carries neither grudges nor hope.
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased
as the not quite imaginable first.
From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,
sky learns no lesson,
leaping through any window as soon as it's raised.
In speech, furious or tender,
it's still of passing sky the words are formed.
Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.
Clear even when not,
sky offers no model, no mirror--cloudy or bright--
to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,
rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky's disinterest.
And so we look right past sky, by it,
through it, to what also is moody and alters--
erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death-bound."

"Downed Branch"

"I wanted to be intimate to my own life.
What came were
the many eating their way through the tree.
Night of no wind, the grass littered with unripe apples.
The limb fell hard.
It was not
the weight of the apples but the many eating,
even on the ground still eating,
anonymous and steady.
Someone else could name them, genus, species.
Someone else could feel for the affection.
I wanted the intimate knowledge
they had of the tree.
Wanted their simple and ruinous hunger,
made without distinction of the lived-in tree."

Excerpt from "Burlap Sack"

"A person is full of sorrow
the way a burlap sack if full of stones or sand.
We say, 'Hand me the sack,'
but we get the weight."

Excerpt from "Against Certainty"

"There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us."

Excerpt from "Each Morning My Neighbor Walks Out

"I cannot let go the longing for what passes."

"Mortality is a sign for humanity our

barbarous ancestors my passion-self

Each assertion must maintain its icon

Faith in proof drives him downward"



"O patient people being

blown to bits one hand

clutching bandages next

bit proverb and byword


Through mined copyhold

we are all here Realism

Is hidden escape possible

One mind as what-is-not"



"If the book is to be opened

I must open it to open it

I must go get it if I am to

go get it I must walk if I

walk I must stand if I am

to stand I must rise if I am

to rise I had better put my

my foot down here is where

consciousness grows dim"



"Nereids come and go without

an active part in anything"



"You take division's side

You and the Oxford thinkers

Certain things are mine"

Excerpt from "Dream Song 6"

"while the cardinals' guile to keep Aeneas out
was failing, while in some hearts Chinese doubt
inscrutably was growing, toward its end,
and a starved lion by a water-hole
clouded with gall, while Abelard was whole,
these grapes of stone were being proffered, friend."

"Dream Song 14"

"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag."

Excerpt from "Dream Song 25"

"--Euphoria,
Mr. Bones, euphoria. Fate clobber all.
--Hand me back my crawl,

condign Heaven. Tighten into a ball
elongate & valved Henry. Tuck him peace.
Render him sightless,
or ruin at high rate his crampon focus,
wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us.
--But, Bones, you is that."

Excerpt from "Dream Song 80"

"Goodness is bits of outer God. The house-guest
(slimmed-down) with one eye open & one breast
out."

Excerpt from "Dream Song 152"

"Young poets are ridiculous, and rare
like a man death-wounded on the mend.

There's a memorial today at N.Y.U.,
your last appearance, old heroic friend.
I hope the girls are pretty
and the remarks radish-crisp befitting you
to allay the horror of your lonely end,
appease, a little, sorrow & pity."

Excerpt from "1910"

"Don't ask me anything. I've seen that things
find their void when they search for direction."

Excerpt from "City without Sleep"

"Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don't dream
and he who flees with broken heart will find on the corners
the still, incredible crocodile under the tender protest of the stars."

Excerpt from "Blind Panorama of New York"

"There's no grief in my voice. Only my teeth exist,
teeth that go silent in the isolation of black satin.
There's no grief in my voice. Here only the earth exists,
the earth with the doors of forever
that lead to the shame of fruit."

Excerpt from "Nocturne of the Hole"

"Inside you, my love, through your flesh,
is the silence of upturned trains,
the flowered arm of a mummy,
the sky without exit, my love, the sky!"

Excerpt from "Moon and Panorama of the Insects"

"Shapes are lies. Only the circle
of oxygen mouths exists."

Excerpt from "Jewish Cemetery"

"Small unhurt sorrows approach the hospitals
and every day the dead take off a suit of blood.
The architectures of frost,
the lyres and moans that escape the tiny leaves
in autumn, soaking the final slopes,
died out in the blackness of felt hats."

Excerpt from "Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition"

"We've inherited hope--
the gift of forgetting.
You'll see how we give
birth among the ruins."

Excerpt from "Landscape"

"Even if you bar my way,
even if you stare me in the face,
I'll pass you by on the chasm's edge, finer than a hair."

Excerpt from "Autotomy"

"The abyss doesn't divide us.
The abyss surrounds us."

Excerpt from "Under One Small Star"

"My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light."

Excerpt from "Quaderno"

We spend our days conversing with chimeras
and take a torch when we go out at night."

"The Lady from the Sea"

"She Born in a lighthouse, I still find it hard
As wife to a doctor ten miles from the coast.
My home is a pleasant one goal I get bored;
the mountains bother me. Now, like a ghost,
you show up here, severe and adamant.
What are you anyhow? What do you want?

He I am a simple man upon the land,
I am a seal upon the open sea.
Your eyes are of the Depths. Give me your hand,
give me your heart and come away with me
to the Spice Islands, the South Seas; anywhere.
Only the strength of habit keeps you here.

She Even up here, enclosed, I sniff the brine,
the open sea out there beyond the beach;
my thoughts are waves, my dreams are estuarine
and deeper than an anchor chain Could reach.
I Knew you'd come, like Some demonic fate
glimpsed at a window or a garden gate.

He How can you live here with no real horizon
someone like you, a mermaid and a Muse,
a figment of your own imagination,
the years elapsing like a tedious cruise?
Your life is like-settled the summer glow;
dark clouds foreshadow the approaching snow.

She Sometimes, emerging from my daily swim
or gazing from the dock thesis quiet nights,
I know my soul siren; and in a dream
Astonished I stare at the harbor lights,
hugging my knees and sitting up alone
as ships glide past darkly with a low moan.

If our mad race he HAD never left the sea,
Had we Remained content with mud and rock,
we might-have saved Ourselves great misery;
Even though this evening we might still go back.
Think of the crashing breakers, the dim haze
of a salt rising sun is watery days.

She My wild spirit unbroken, should I return
to the tide, choosing at last my other life,
reverting to blue water and sea-brine,
or do I still have a faithful wife?
If faithful is the word for one clings Who
lost to the pre-existence of previous things.

He Do you remember the great vow you made
to the one man you --other thing from men?
The years-have come between, with nothing Said,
and now the stranger HAS Appeared again
form to claim your love and make it new.
You ask me what I am; what purpose are you?

She I am a troubled woman on the land,
I am a seal upon the open sea,
goal it's too late to give my heart and hand
to someone Who Remains a mystery.
Siren or not, this is my proper place;
Go to your ship and leave me here in peace.

Excerpt from "At Night"

"Oh are you asleep, or lying awake, my lover?
Open your dreams to my love and your heart to my words,
I send you my thoughts--the air between us is laden,
My thoughts fly in at your window, a flock of wild birds"

Excerpt from "Peace"

"I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies,--
You are my deepening skies,
Give me your stars to hold."

"Deep in the Night"

"Deep in the night the cry of a swallow,
Under the stars he flew,
Keen as pain was his call to follow
Over the world to you.

Love in my heart is a cry forever
Lost as the swallow's flight,
Seeking for you and never, never
Stilled by the stars at night."

Excerpt from "The Inn of Earth"

"'Since there is neither food nor rest,
I go where I fared before'--
But the Host went by with averted eye
And barred the outer door."

Excerpts from "Sappho"

"The gods have given life--I gave them a song;
The debt is paid and now I turn to go."

"I taught the world thy music, now alone I sing for one who falls asleep to hear."

Excerpts from "Furious Versions"

"I'm like my landlocked poplars: far
from water, I'm full of the sound of water."

"The past
doesn't fall away, the past
joins the greater
telling, and is."

"The Interrogation"

Two streams: one dry, one poured all night by our beds.

I’ll wonder
about neither.

The dry one was clogged with bodies.

I’m through
with memory.

At which window of what house did light teach you tedium?
On which step of whose stairway did you learn indecision?

I’m through
sorting avenues and doors,
curating houses and death.

Which house did we flee by night? Which house did we flee by day?

Don’t ask me.

We stood and watched one burn; from one we ran away.

I’m neatly folding
the nights and days, notes
to be forgotten

We were diminished. We were not spared. There was no pity.
Neither was their sanctuary. Neither rest.
There were fires in the streets. We stood among men, at the level
of their hands, all those wrists, dead or soon to die.

No more
letting my survival
depend on memory.

There was the sea; its green volume brought despair.
There was waiting, there was leaving. There was
astonishment too. The astonishment of
'I thought you died!” “How did you get out?'
'And Little Fei Fei walked right by the guards!'

I grow
leaden with stories,
my son’s eyelids
grow heavy.

Who rowed the boat when our father tired?

Don’t ask me.

Who came along? Who got left behind?

Ask the sea.

Through it all there was no song, and weeping
came many years later.

I’m through
with memory.

Sometimes a song,
even when there was weeping.

I’m through with memory.

Can’t you still smell the smoke on my body?"

"The Hour and What is Dead"

"Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away."

Excerpt from "My Father, in Heaven, is Reading Out Loud"

"He waited merely, as always someone
waits, far, near, here, hereafter, to find out:
is it praise or lament hidden in the next moment?"

Excerpt from "A Story"

"a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence."

Excerpt from "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium"

"Look: I am nothing.
I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes."

"The Jewel"

"There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds."

Excerpt from "Two Hangovers"

"In a pine tree,
A few yards away from my window sill,
A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,
On a branch.
I laugh, as I see him abandon himself,
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break."

Excerpt from "Arriving in the Country Again"

"My face is turned away from the sun.
A horse grazes in my long shadow."

Excerpt from "A Blessing"

"Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom."

Excerpt from "A Life Drama"

"Tears invade the privacy of private lives
In the house overlooking the park
The piano is seldom mute
The plectrum on the lawn vanishes"

Excerpt from "Measles"

"I write, trying to economize
These lines, tingling."

Excerpts from "A Last World"

"But having plucked oneself, who could live in the sunlight?"

"Flower
Are you afraid of trembling like breath
But there is no breath in seriousness; the lake howls for it."

"Chinese Foot Chart"

"Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock."

"Ideal Audience"

"Not scattered legions,
not a dozen from
a single region
for whom accent
matters, not a seven-
member coven,
not five shirttail
cousins; just
one free citizen--
maybe not alive
now even--who
will know with
exquisite gloom
that only we two
ever found this room."

"Trying to Raise the Dead"

"Look at me. I’m standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
friends inside the house. It’s not my

house, you don’t know them.
They’re drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love

this song, remember, 'Ophelia.'
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I’m whispering

so they won’t think I’m crazy.
They don’t know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.

I’m talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-

shaped shadows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an axe
between the branches. What are you

now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.

A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening.
I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.

Say burning bush. Say stone. They’ve
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It’s April. I’m

on Spring Street. That’s my gray car
in the driveway. They’re laughing
and dancing. Someone’s bound

to show up soon. I’m waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I’m the only one here on my knees."

"Prayer"

"Sweet Jesus, let her save you, let her take
your hands and hold them to her breasts,
slip the sandals from your feet, lay your body down
on sheets beaten clean against the fountain stones.
Let her rest her dark head on your chest,
let her tongue lift the hairs like a sword tip
parting the reeds, let her lips burnish
your neck, let your eyes be wet with pleasure.
Let her keep you from that other life, as a mother
keeps a child from the brick lip of a well,
though the rope and bucket shine and clang,
though the water's hidden silk and mystery call.
Let her patter soothe you and her passions
distract you, let her show you the light
storming the windows of her kitchen, peaches
in a wooden bowl, a square of blue cloth
she has sewn to her skirt to cover the tear.
What could be more holy than the curve of her back
as she sits, her hands opening a plum.
What could be more sacred than her eyes,
fierce and complicated as the truth, your life
rising behind them, your name on her lips.
Stay there, in her bare house, the black pots
hung from pegs, bread braided and glazed
on the table, a clay jug of violet wine.
There is the daily sacrament of rasp and chisel,
another chair to be made, shelves to be hewn
cleanly and even and carefully joined
to the sun-scrubbed walls, a sharp knife
for carving odd chunks of wood into small toys
for the children. Oh Jesus, close your eyes
and listen to it, the air is alive with bird calls
and bees, the dry rustle of palm leaves,
her distracted song as she washes her feet.
Let your death be quiet and ordinary.
Either life you choose will end in her arms."

Excerpt from "Poem in Three Parts"

"I have suffered and survived the night
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass."

Excerpt from "Summer, 1960, Minnesota"

"Inside me there is a confusion of swallows,
Birds flying through the smoke,
And horses galloping excitedly on fields of short grass."

Excerpt from "Billie's Blues"

"You spin in the yard,
hanging clothes, watering the lawn,
humming along with the radio,
to the blues, and after all these years,
you still sometimes forget the words."

Excerpt from "A Non-Bithday Poem for my Father"

"It is not a metaphor my father needs,
but a way of getting down
what it means to spring from the circle,
and come back again."

Excerpt from "Moving to Wake at Six"

"The town is changing voices,
changing faces, moving from one
life to another, and I am still
at the point of choosing to move
and wake, or fall off again,
one of those who cannot scurry
to the solemn cluck of a clock,
one who cannot give up
the frightening warmth of shroud-like clothes,
where perhaps I could wake,
under a tinted window,
to conjure up a glazed lake,
a bearded man and a boy,
and a vision that could be my own."

Excerpt from "Morning, Leaving Calle Gigantes"

"Drunken and content, I move,
but am caught in a circle of little girls,
flying from the church like doves.
They do not speak,
but come with their small hands
folded piously near their pink chasubles.
Frightened, I walk as they,
as if we could not speak,
or walk upon anything solid,
almost as if we were plucked
from a garden to float in clear air,
silently spinning, as if the wind
would take us dancing over the traffic bridge,
past the market, until we would learn
to whisper, to beg to be released
and dropped where we would wither in good light.
I think that they could walk so forever,
unburdened by my smell,
waiting for me to speak,
or break the circle,
waiting, perhaps, for me to tear my shirt,
and scream, fall and roll stuttering
at their innocent feet,
rise and rip their innocent chasubles,
growl and gnaw at their innocent hands,
curse and drag them down on the bridge,
caught in their calm eyes.
They would not speak.
They have no language
to contain that kind of desire.
No Jesus can teach them
to flock like doves,
where I am waiting to stay my death
with theirs."

Excerpt from "Jalapena Gypsies"

"You are always
in the beginning
of some prophecy
that you will not believe
to save your life.

You travel in cities
that travel in you,
lost in the ache
of knowing none."

Excerpt from "Night Walk"

"Death is the language of these streets
though death will never own them/
When it is all done
so much of your life
is how & what you speak/
if you go away
you carry the speech in your bones/
Nothing is invented there/in you
you come to that
even though the streets cluck their triumph
& you sit in the dawn
with the old man piercing your tongue."

Excerpt from "Am I Not Among the Early Risers"

"And, while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see
everything?
Have I not been stung as I watched their milling
and gleaming,
and stung hard?"

Excerpt from "Stars"

"I stood very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.
What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?"

Excerpt from "Three Songs"

"Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song."

Excerpt from "The Osprey"

"I came back

and stood on the shore, thinking--
and if you think
thinking is a mild exercise,
beware!

I mean, I was swimming for my life--
and I was thundering this way and that way
in my shirt of feathers--
and I could not resolve anything long enough

to become one thing
except this: the imaginer."

Excerpt from "October Arriving"

"I only have a measly ant
To think with today.
Others have pictures of saints,
Others have clouds in the sky."

Excerpt from "Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness"

"A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way light falls on the bear trees and bushes."

Excerpt from "A Letter"

"There was no one else in the park,
Only bare trees with an infinity of tragic shapes
To make thinking difficult."

Excerpt from "The Betrothal"

"I found a key
In the street, someone's
House key
Lying there, glinting,

Long ago. The one
Who lost it
Is not going to remember it
Tonight, as I do."

Excerpt from "Romantic Sonnet"

"Was I that skinny boy stretched out
In the field behind the house,
His heart cut out with a toy knife?
Was I the crow hovering over him?"

Excerpt from "Emily's Theme"

"My dear trees, I no longer recognize you
In this wintry light.
You brought me a reminder I can do without:
The world is old, it was always old,
There's nothing new in it this afternoon."

Excerpt from "Talking to the Ceiling"

"There are a million zeros crowding for warmth

Inside my head and making it so heavy.

Do you hear them adding and subtracting in the dark?"

Excerpt from "Night Panic"

"There was the sky, starless and vast--
Home of every one of our dark thoughts--
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand."

Excerpt from "Conversation"

"It was more or less late afternoon
and I came over a hilltop
and smack in front of me was the sunset."

Excerpt from "Middle Path"

"everything found a way to show you its insides
in those days when you walked on Middle Path on fire
in the clear idea that it could be done,
but, since speech that expresses trouble
takes going through hell, also afraid
that it could not be done for long."

Excerpt from "Pure Balance"

"Future tramples all prediction.
Hope loses hope. Clarity
turns out to be
an invisible form of sadness.
We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings
all the way to the sea
have been bombed."

Excerpt from "Pilgrimage"

"each poem a breath
nailed to nothing."

Excerpt from "One of those things we say"

"I love how intimate I've become with failure."

Excerpt from "Elegy to unnamed sources"

"what a stark easel the sky
never asked to be."

"Born again"

"One day I was introduced to a bed
in which a woman was born, gave birth, and died.

The woman who introduced me to the bed
was the granddaughter of the woman
who was born in the bed and never lived
in another house.

Being a child of wind, I whispered
in the company of so much permanence.

The woman found my reverence ridiculous.

I knew this because she took off her clothes
and got on the bed as a way of asking me
to join her in making the bed a living bed.

It was in that bed that the woman told me
she tried to kill herself at seventeen.

Lots of Valium under a tree with horses nearby
ignoring her to eat.

This is my second life, she said, the one I got
for now knowing more about drugs, for being shy
when it came to my father's shotgun
in my mouth.

By then, she'd lived a hundred years
in dog years beyond when she'd wanted to die.

When I told her this, she said, Woof.

The bed squeaked each time we turned
or breathed our bodies into each other.

I keep asking myself if this story is true.

I seem to believe it is, seem to admire time
and making love on top of musical springs
and the world every day for not killing itself,
not exploding or burning down
as it might reasonably want to.

And the woman?

I seem to know her or contain her or think
the valley in which I live
would resemble her if someone had the language
to convince it to rise and be a woman
wearing a flowered dress.

Women are more likely to wear gardens
than men, to be valleys, to hold time
in their bodies and take us
inside what is passing
as it passes, what is arriving
as we leave.

And the man?

I seem to be him or want him
to be the feeling that stars
would look down on us and ask
What are you going through
if only they had mouths."

"Leave a message"

"When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held
by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call."

Excerpt from "The Way Things Work"

"The way things work
is that eventually
something catches."

"Tennessee June"

"This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit;
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns
bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in...
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there. Oh

let it touch you...

The porch is sharply lit--little box of the body--
and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.
Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze
the fat tobacco slums,
the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill.
Rock out into that dark and back to where
the blind moths circle, circle,
back and forth from the bone-white house to the creepers unbraiding.
Nothing will catch you.
Nothing will let you go.
We call it blossoming--
the spirit breaks from you and you remain."

"Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts"

"I understand that it is grafting,
this partnership of lost wills, common flowers.

That only perfection can be kept, not
its perfect instances. Snap-

dragon what can I expect of you,
dress of the occasion?

So I am camouflaged,
so the handsome bones make me invisible.

It is useless. Randomness,
the one lost handkerchief at my heart,

is the one I dropped and know
to look for. Indeed, clues,

how partial I am to bleeding hues,
to clustering. Almond,

stone fruit,
you would be a peach, an apricot--

but see how close you can come without
already being there, the evening pulled in

at your waist, slipping over your feet,
driving them firmly into place,

the warm evening saying Step, anywhere you go
is yours, sweet scent in a hurry, to bloom is to be

taken completely--.
With petals, creaseless and ambitious,

may I break your even weave, loosen your knot,

and if I break you are you mine?"

Excerpt from "Flooding"

"And everywhere you go you are the land between the lakes,
the stroke of luck which has the world
it splits in two
for wings."

Excerpt from "The Nature of Evidence"

"...I would like to catch the world
at pure idea--although, as with my profile, I,
turning to it, find
only myself again."

Excerpt from "Endless Streams and Mountains"

"The trail goes far inland,
somewhere back around a bay,
lost in distant foothill slopes
& back again
at a village on the beach, and someone’s fishing."

Excerpt from "Night Highway 99"

"The road that's followed goes forever;
in half a minute crossed and left behind."

Excerpt from "Ma"

"Been hot here the last couple days.
Rained all around us not a drop fell here.
I am pretty busy since everyone here is gone watering things."

Excerpt from "The Flowing"

"A soft breath, world-wide, of night and day,
rising, falling,
The Great Mind passes by its own
fine-honed thoughts,
going each way."

Excerpts from "Drawn from the generation of FIRE"

"the dead are lit by candlelight
around a gleaming table,
their books lie open,
the pages chosen"

"Read to me tonight by the fire,
a book is burning in my hands"

"Forms of Forts"

Hay Fort

"A labyrinth. A pencil shaft of light
wherever four bales could not squarely meet.
The twine tight, lifting as abrading.

A twinge, the prickly collar rubbing
a scratching rash along the forearm.
The heaviness of the hay in the hot dark.

So earnestly, we set
to building for ourselves.
That there should be something
where before there was nothing.

Then the fervent hours
of catching and pretending,
the dreaming hours of strings
and lucky stones.

If you touch one of your hands
with another, the one that touches
will seem alive, the other like
an object to be awakened.

When winter ended,
the doors were rolled back and the broad day
flooded the loft.
And then we could see, in the swath

of sunlight, the stray clover bud,
or jewelweed, or fireweed
or evening primrose,
or robin's plaintain,

Thistle, or chicory,
even once great mullein--
the leaf that is called
velvet dock.

Whatever had been in the mower's path
was bound and pressed into the hay.

You cannot know both hands at once;
you must choose between the living and the dead.

A labyrinth broken open from above
or worn away at its foundations.

That there might be something when there is nothing
and the source of light confused with holiness."

Snow Fort

"Come in, come here, come into
this place that has been made for us,
that was packed and braced for us
against the collapsing rain.
Come in, it's a cavern in the white
heart of the sea. Come in
where the silence is like breathing
moonlight, where a faint taste
of iodine will lie on your lips
and you'll never be cold again.
In every part of space, there is another part of space.
When this is gone, it will not disappear."

Excerpt from "Let me tell you about my marvelous god"

"How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm
when you pluck him from the air,
when you pluck him from that sky
where grieving swirls, and you will burn again
throwing him back."

"What You Said about the Moon"

"All the little lies follow the big lie
while the big lie is pared away.

Fading face, old friend
of my left hand waning;
of my right hand waxing:
gibbous mirror womb for womb.

Throbbing pulse and dangling watch,
globing, shrinking, hinged
where night
unhinges night.

Cause of eloquence
ending in derangement.

There could be such a thing as too much feeling.

I had meant to harvest, not to hunt.

Turn your money over,
blow ashes,
whisper 'I saw you before you saw me.'"

Excerpt from "Night Songs"

"Bonfire or barnfire
accident or not
pain's a form of telescope
for watchers on the hill."

Excerpt from "The Seasons"

"You wanted summer or you wanted death.
So death came again, and that was autumn."

"Faith"

"I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith."

Excerpt from "Song of One Who Goes On"

"What I have not seen
or failed to see
I leave as a gift."

Excerpt from "Night Song"

"I request of the God who dwells in the dark
and who lifts his arms in the light

to keep my son's memory true
to that inheritance of rest and revelation
that flows from the far side of night.

No matter how the days
may age us
youth awaits us in our sleep.

That great, final, unburdening
we now rehearse,
singing the close of the light."