On Softness

God, I am tired of writing about you.
Downbeat. Upbeat. A pretty metaphor about geese
and Indian Summer.

I am so sad but I am still shaving my legs.
No one is touching my shins but I still
rub coconut oil into my ankles after
I shower. I spray rosewater onto my cheeks until
I glow. I am so soft and I run my fingertips over my
stomach when I miss you, palms whisper soft like kissing
a stranger, a hundred peach fuzz hairs, duckling
new and I love every one (everyone).
I am soft as the sweet, wet bruise on an overripe plum.
Soft as grayblack winter slush. Soft as the flame
that licks your passing palm.

Once, I slept beside you so often that when I smelled
perfume on your pillow it was my own.

Once, I burned myself boiling water in your kitchen and you
cupped your hands around my fingers like you’d captured a moth,
your face like my hand was something fragile and winged.

Once, we were arguing and you said “God, we are married,”
but I don’t think you meant me to remember that.

When I think of you, I think of sunrise, the way we always
fought it to keep talking even when I was sleeping with
my phone in my hand.

When I think of you, I think of heavy blankets,
hot coffee, a valley of pillows.

I told you I am good at math but I do not know how to add up a year.
Still, next week I may miss you less.

For now, I do my laundry, kiss my cousin’s
baby girl on both cheeks, put on lipgloss just to
play piano in my robe.

I still write you into all my lists, try to stitch
you into the bindings of my books. Once, in a poem,
I called you a church but you are not an image
about the fragility of stone. Missing you is not a tornado.
We are neither the wolf nor the lamb in its teeth.
We are not epic, not myth, not legend. We are not simile.
There is nothing we are like or as.

Here is the truth:
Once, we were two people.
Once, we curled toward each other like a pair of parentheses
around something secret.

Here is the truth:
I am still softening my edges.
I am still wearing the same perfume.
I am still hoping that I smell like home
even when home is not with you.

Tomorrow I will miss you less.
God, I am tired of writing about you.

- J.S.

You deserve to discover the joys of life

When you
find yourself drowning in
self-hate,

remind yourself - you
weren’t born feeling this way;

remind yourself - somewhere
in your journey
some person or experience
sent you the message
that there was something wrong with
who you are,

and you then internalized
those messages and
took them on
as your truth.

But that hate isn’t yours to carry, and
those judgments aren’t about you.

And in the same way that you
learned
to think badly of yourself, you can
learn
to think new, self-loving and accepting thoughts.

You can learn to challenge
those beliefs, take away
their power, and reclaim
your own.

It won’t be easy, and
it won’t happen over night.

But it is possible.

And it starts when
you decide
that there has to be more
to life than this pain you feel.

It starts
when you decide
that
you deserve to discover it.

-- Danielle Keopke
(arranged, edited quote)

Young Man

I seemed always standing
before a door
to which I had no key,
although I knew it hid behind it
a gift for me.

Until one day I closed
my eyes a moment, stretched
then looked once more.
And not surprised, I did not mind it
when the hinges creaked
and, smiling, Death
held out his hands to me.

-- John Haines --

The only struggle that really counts

when you realise you've gone
a few weeks
and haven't felt that awful struggle
of your childish self—struggling
to lift itself out of its
inadequacy and incompetence—
you'll know you've gone
some weeks
without meeting new challenge, and
without growing, and
that you've gone
some weeks
towards losing touch with yourself.

The only calibration that counts
is how much heart people invest,
how much they ignore their fears
of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

And the only thing people regret
is that they didn't live boldly enough,
that they didn't invest enough heart,
didn't love enough.

Nothing else really counts at all.

It was a saying about noble figures
in old Irish poems
—he would give his hawk
to any man that asked for it,
yet he loved his hawk better
than men nowadays
love their bride of tomorrow.
He would mourn a dog
with more grief than men nowadays
mourn their fathers.

-- Ted Hughes
(letter to his son, Nicholas, 1986)
(contained in Letters of Ted Hughes)
(arranged quote)

Fulfillment

Fulfillment is a function of time.

The search for pleasure is
circular, repetitive, atemporal.

The variety seeking of
the spectator,
the thrill hunter,
the promiscuous,
always ends in the same place.

It comes to the end
and has to start over.

It is not a journey and return,
but a closed cycle,
a locked room,
a cell.

It is not until an act occurs
within the landscape
of the past and the future
that it is a human act.

Loyalty, which asserts the
continuity of past and future,
binding time in a whole,
is the foot of mans strength;

there is no good to be done without it.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

My hero bares his nerves

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal rule,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wires to the skull
Ache on lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart
Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from this box of nerves
Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.

-- dylan thomas

This Dark Water

Reading in another man's book,
of voyages in a tropic sea
and strange thoughts
under the green silence
of an equatorial forest,
I found this passage:

"You, in the hard and bitter
north, on the exposed summit
of the world where Polaris
glitters in the forehead of a
frozen god . . ."

And it spoke to me of ourselves
here in the vast, lonely
twilight of Alaska
with the rumors of war steadily
pulsing against the hillside.

The friends we have
are few and distant,
their words reach us through
the onrushing season
like the hurried sentences
of those about to depart.

Appalling shadows grope
among the trees outside.
A nameless animal
crawls through the grass
to stand on hairy legs
and stare unblinking
through the window.

We have drawn in the flesh
against our bones
and gripped to our hearts
the warmth of our
troubled companionship.

It is as if we had been
sitting here for years, in a house
like a vessel bound outward
on the yellow tide of dusk,
with the helmsman asleep
and the sightless crew
staring ahead into nothing --
this dark water
that closes over our heads.

-- John Haines --

The World's End for those that Remain

Robert Frost wrote
that the world may end
in fire or ice.

From what I've seen,
heard and imagined,
all I can conclude
is that the world could end
in any number of ways, and
there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The only choice any of us has
is what to do
if we're still here after it happens.

Do we die a little death
every day ourselves, or
do we reach for someone's hand
and dance again?

-- Heather Linde, in 2015 Alaska Sampler
(arranged, edited quote)

Horns

I went to the edge of the wood
in the color of evening,
and rubbed with a piece of horn
against a tree,
believing the great, dark moose
would come, his eyes
on fire with the moon.
.
I fell asleep in an old white tent.
The October moon rose,
and down a wide, frozen stream
the moose came roaring,
hoarse with rage and desire.
.
I awoke and stood in the cold
as  he slowly circled the camp.
His horns exploded in the brush
with dry trees cracking
and falling; his nostrils flared
as, swollen-necked, smelling
of challenge, he stalked by me.
.
I called him back, and he came
and stood in the shadow
not far away, and gently rubbed
his horns against the icy willows.
I heard him breathing softly.
Then with a faint sigh of warning
Soundlessly he walked away.
.
I stood there in the moonlight,
and the darkness and silence
surged back, flowing around me,
full of wild enchantment,
as though a god had spoken.

-- John Haines --

Excerpts: The Book of Monastic Life, Rainier Maria Rilke's The Book of Hour

The hour is striking so close above me,

so clear and sharp,

that all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: there's a power in me

to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real

without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

The the knowing comes. I can open

to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

You, darkness, of whom I am born --

I love you more than the flame

that limits the world

to the circle it illumines

and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything

shapes and shadows, creatures and me,

people, nations -- just as they are.

It lets me imagine

a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

-Rainier Marie Rilke, The Book of Monastic Life 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 1.11

Rising From The Well

Once in Arkansas I pried the boards
from an old-time well
and lowered myself down,
bracing my back against the stones
till the circle of light above me
became a kind of moon.
The coolness of air boarded up
in the earth crept under my shirt,
and the stones grew slippery
with seepage and moss
the farther I went down.
Ten feet? Twenty? I couldn't tell how far
before I became afraid
of the looseness of the stones,
the fact that I was miles
from the note I left that morning.
There, balled up in a well
that no one had drunk from,
maybe for decades, I dropped
lit matches and heard their hiss
as they hit the water
I couldn't see. But what
I remember most about that day
was the climbing back toward light
and how it was difficult,
the heat of late July
and the gradually expanding sky
that opened upon on goldenrod
as I crested the rim of the well.

- charles rafferty

anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sand his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stairs rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

- e.e. cummings

As For the Poets

As for poets
The Earth Poets
Who write small poems;
Need help from no man.

The Air Poets
Play out the swiftest gales
And sometimes loll in the eddies.
Poem after poem,
Curling back on the same thrust.

At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
And propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn at absolute zero
Fossil love pumped back up.

The first
Water Poet
Stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
Left millions of tints
Different tracks
Criss-crossing through the mud.

With the Sun and Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky--
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.

-- Gary Snyder

Where once the twilight locks

Where once the twilight locks no longer
Locked in the long worm of my finger
Nor dammed the sea that sped about my fist,
The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
The milky acid on each hinge,
And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was sucked
And all the dry seabed unlocked,
I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
That globe itself of hair and bone
That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

My fuses timed to charge his heart,
He blew like powder to the light
And held a little sabbath with the sun,
But when the stars, assuming shape,
Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,
He drowned his father's magics in a dream.

All issue armoured, of the grace,
The redhaired cancer still alive,
The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;
Some dead undid their bushy jaws,
And bags of blood let out their flies;
He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.

Sleep navigates the tides of time;
The dry Sargasso of the tomb
Gives up its dead to such a working sea;
And sleep rolls mute above the beds
Where fishes' food is fed the shades
Who periscope through flowers to the sky.

The hanged who lever from the limes
Ghostly propellers for their limbs,
The cypress lads who wither with the cock,
These, and the others in sleep's acres.
Of dreaming men make moony suckers,
And snipe the fools of vision in the back.

When once the twilight screws were turned,
And mother milk was stiff as sand,
I sent my own ambassador to light;
By trick or chance he fell asleep
And conjured up a carcase shape
To robe me of my fluids in his heart.

Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,
A worker in the morning town,
And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;
The fences of the light are down,
All but the briskest riders thrown,
And worlds hang on the trees.

-- dylan thomas

Bedrock

for Masa

Snowmelt pond     warm granite
we make camp,
no thought of finding more.
and nap
and leave our minds to the wind.

on the bedrock, gently tilting,
sky and stone,

teach me to be tender.

the touch that nearly missed--
brush of glances--
tiny steps--
that finally cover worlds
                of hard terrain.
cloud wisps and mists
gathered into slate blue
bolts of summer rain.

tea together in the purple starry eve;
new moon soon to set,
why does it take so
long to learn to
love,
       we laugh
                      and grieve.


-- gary snyder

End of April

Under a cherry tree
I found a robin’s egg,
broken, but not shattered.

I had been thinking of you,
and was kneeling in the grass
among fallen blossoms

when I saw it: a blue scrap,
a delicate toy, as light
as confetti

It didn’t seem real,
but nature will do such things
from time to time.

I looked inside:
it was glistening, hollow,
a perfect shell

except for the missing crown,
which made it possible
to look inside.

What had been there
is gone now
and lives in my heart

where, periodically,
it opens up its wings,
tearing me apart.

--Phillis Levin

Your Story

If you don’t
turn your life into
a story,

you just
become a part
of someone else’s
story.

– Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
(arranged quote)

Ebb

I know what my heart is like
      Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
      Left there by the tide,
      A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poverty's Shod Slave-ships

There is something about poverty
that smells like death.

Dead dreams dripping off the heart
like leaves in a dry season and
rotting around the feet;

impulses smothered too long in the
fetid air of underground caves.

The soul lives in a sickly air.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road,
(arranged)

When Like A Running Grave

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
Deliver me who timid in my tribe,
Of love am barer than Cadaver's trap
Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
Of the bone inch

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time's jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver's country in my force,
My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone
Despair of blood faith in the maiden's slime,
Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain
On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.
No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer
Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.
You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar
Tells the stick, 'fail.'

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer's fashion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Not city tar and subway bored to foster
Man through macadam.

I dump the waxlights in your tower dome.
Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver's shoot
Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,
Love's twilit nation and the skull of state,
Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,
(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,
Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,
The actions' end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind
With whistler's cough contages, time on track
Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,
Happy Cadaver's hunger as you take
The kissproof world.

-- Dylan Thomas

To question answers

It is not the writer's task to answer questions
but to question answers. To be impertinent,
insolent, and if necessary, subversive.

- Edward Abbey