I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep…. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for… Continue reading May Sarton
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. – Wallace Stevens, from “The Plain Sense of Things,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (Vintage; Reissue edition, February 19, 1990)
‘Believe your pain.’ This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won’t finally unclasp. – Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Edition Unstated edition, April 10, 1997) Originally published 1995.
In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin — T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Harcourt, 1943)
To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers — Pablo Neruda, from “Love,” Book of Twilights, trans. William O’Daly (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)
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… Continue reading Mary Oliver
This is almost goodbye. —Jack Spicer, from “Orpheus’ Song to Apollo,” My Vocabulary Did This to Me (Wesleyan University Press , 2008)
Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth, Holding me in a time that’s gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass. —Larry Levis, from “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It,” Elegy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)
Passion gives me moments of wholeness. — Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One, 1931-1934 (Mariner Books, 1969)
You smile—friend. What does it matter! No one knows how to deliver in the hands what’s hidden inside, but I give you my soul, amphora of soft honeys, and I give everything to you … Less that one memory … In my empty estate, that lost love is a white rose that opens in silence.… Continue reading Pablo Neruda
The Vale of Soul-Making 