Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased... what would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world? Have I walked long enough where the sea breaks raspingly all day and all night upon the pale sand?
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left – fields everywhere invite you into them.
Inside every mind, there’s a hermit’s cave full of light.
As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.
I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.
But if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing.
How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?
I think this is the prettiest world – so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?
When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?
But dawn – dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.
We grew into that perilous place: we grew fond.
Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.
What shall I do? When I pick up the broom he leaves the room. When I fuss with kindling he runs for the yard. Then he’s back, and we hug for a long time. In his low-to-the-ground chest I can hear his heart slowing down. Then I rub his shoulders and kiss his feet and fondle his long hound ears. Benny, I say, don’t worry. I also know the way the old life haunts the new.
So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always.
But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.
The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.
The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river – remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn’t remember the sun rising, if I couldn’t remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t even remember, beloved, your beloved name.