To stare at nothing is to learn by heartWhat all of us will be swept into, and baring oneselfTo the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at… Continue reading Mark Strand
I subsidenudged by the softeningdriftwood of your body,tangle on you like a water-weed caughton a submerged tree limb with sleep like a swampgrowing, closing around me — Margaret Atwood, from “Pre-Amphibian,” The Circle Game (Contact Press, 1966)
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,Who claimed to have known me years before, Approached, saying there were many poetsWandering around who wished to be alive again.They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say— Words whose absence had been the silence of love,Of pain, and even of pleasure.——Mark Strand,… Continue reading Mark Strand
like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of… Continue reading Mark Strand
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony. – Douglas Coupland
the stars above //// speaking so //////// softly until it’s time to go inside again ////////////////////////////// and dream //////// of when you swung close to the moon,your shadow bursting //////////////////// with such lovely light — Joanna Clearly, from “Blank Star Sonnet,” L’Éphémère Review (no. 13: Dulcet, Summer 2019)
The History of Poetry Our masters are gone and if they returnedWho among us would hear them, who would knowThe bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly soundOf the body, endless and vanishing, that tunedOur days before the wheeling starsWere stripped of power? The answer isNone of us here. And what does it mean if… Continue reading Mark Strand
Somewhere there is someone so close to you, there are no details — Anne Michaels, from “Somewhere Night Is Falling,” All We Saw: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017)
And those you never forgive you find impossible to forget. — Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (McClelland & Stewart, 1997)
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line… Continue reading Margaret Atwood
The Vale of Soul-Making 