I have seen the heart Move like a doe through the woods, move Like a stunned doe, deeper and deeper, Through trees that turn and close behind her, The way water closes over a dropped stone, Or a torn limb, or a lasting wound … — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from “Botticelli’s St. Sebastian,” Song. .… Continue reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly
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
There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness … I must intoxicate myself on magic perfumes in order to fathom the secrets that lie hidden in the abysses of the Unconscious. — C.G. Jung, letter to Sigmund Freud, 1911. The Dionysian Self: C. G. Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche by Paul Bishop.… Continue reading C.G. Jung
I could lie around all day wanting the brush of your lips. Between your lips, the dark field meets a night sky. I am inside each ragged breath and the pause between. — Carole Glasser Langille, from “When You’re Not Here and When You Are,” Late in a Slow Time (Mansfield Press, 2003)
Lightly the air presses down on our shoulders its great blue thumbs, lightly, as if afraid to hurt us. What will you do when the sky falls, brother? See? the sparrows hold it up: pray to them. — Donald Finkel, from “Vogelfanger,” Poetry (March 1965)
He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict dosing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most. […] In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had… Continue reading Gabriel García Márquez
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? ― Mary Oliver, from “Peonies,” New and Selected Poems, Volume One. (Beacon Press; Revised edition November 15, 2005) Originally published 1992.
Maybe she loved me, maybe not – who knows? Not even the gods can see into a human heart – it’s that dark. ―Gregory Orr, from “Orpheus Descending,” Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence. (Copper Canyon Press; First Edition edition February 1, 2001)
Language is what honors the vanishing. Or is language what slows the leaving? Or does it only deepen what we know of loss? — Jacqueline Berger, from “The Failure of Language,” The Gift That Arrives Broken: Poems. (Autumn House Press January 10, 2010)
And for this world, the flesh is not good for much at all, except to love and then to mourn. — Paul Guest, from “The Flesh,” The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World. (New Issues Poetry & Prose; 1 edition January 1, 2003)
The Vale of Soul-Making 