All things are inventions of holiness. Some more rascally than others. I.
The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.
What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work – who is thus responsible to the work.
Congratulations, if you have changed.
The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.
This I have always known – that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret.
And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.
What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon.
It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.
We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions – even to a certainty – as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report.
Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough.
Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies – in holiness and mirth.
I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.
When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain – long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.
ON THE BEACH On the beach, at dawn: four small stones clearly hugging each other. How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make and who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business? When the sun broke it poured willingly its light over the stones that did not move, not at all, just as, to its always generous term, it shed its light on me, my own body that loves, equally, to hug another body.
To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.
Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.
I am so vast, uncertain and strange.
More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing – the reason they can fly.