Surely there’s a place to resta tortured mind.Since sundownI’ve been walking with these blues:the blue of your eyes,a well with no water. — J. Todd Hawkins, from “When You Let Him in the Room,” This Geography of Thorns: Blues Poetry from the Mississippi Delta & Beyond (Poetry Society of Texas, 2020)
stars that turn slowly offeach dawn so that we beginto see how many thingscan go on living without us, — Richard Jackson, from “Triptych,” Broken Horizons: Poems (Press 53, 2018)
Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. ― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of… Continue reading John Steinbeck
It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles… Continue reading James Joyce
into the strenuous briefnessLife:handorgans and Aprildarkness,friends i charge laughing.Into the hair-thin tintsof yellow dawn,into the women-coloured twilight i smilinglyglide. Iinto the big vermilion departureswim,sayingly; (Do you think?)thei do,worldis probably madeof roses & hello: (of solongs and,ashes) — E.E. Cummings, ” [into the strenuous briefness],” 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press January 10, 1994) Originally published 1954.
Aloneness and all-oneness is our authentic nature. We are always alone and all-one. We came into this planet alone and all-one. We will leave alone and all-one. And also during our whole staying in this world, no matter how we engage in relationships, we continue to be alone and all-one, though we may forget about… Continue reading Franco Santoro
Time, like a swallow’s shadow cutting across the grass,Faint, darker, then faint again,Imprints our ecstasy, and scores us.And time will finish this, not I, and write it out, as only time can. — Charles Wright, from “Summer Mornings,” A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.5 ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Sidgwick and Jackson (January 1, 1945)
The camera of the eyeSpools out twelve months; the memorySpells underneath, — Philip Larkin, from “Poem,” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)
Love is being stupid together. ― Paul Valéry
The Vale of Soul-Making 