For some of us there is only the shadow we step behindthat turns always into night, a night that leaves no memory.Its galaxies constantly change shape because of the weightof dark matter. This too is only a question of belief. For us,there is no difference between the moon and its reflection.The earth releases the song… Continue reading Richard Jackson
I don’t want to see you caught like a word in that last line.What does the nightingale do when it runs out of things to say?Only this: I have never been so astonished at the love of one womanwhich is the way the moon finally closes its eye behind a ridge,the way the wind never… Continue reading Richard Jackson
Letter to Jo from Radovna Valley, Slovenia If I would just hear from you, the wind would no longer huntalong the cliffs, the light would no longer seem forged.If I would hear from you, maybe this sudden fearwould not have tracked me here where the air is stillbruised by these distant deaths. Sept. 20, 1944:this… Continue reading Richard Jackson
There were days when we could catch light in a butterfly net. — Richard Jackson, from “That’s What I’m Talking About,” Resonance: Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)
Each evening comesfrom a new place. Maybe this is the other lifewe were meant to live. It leans against you asthe wind. — Richard Jackson, from “Fear,” Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)
It is not hard to imagine how quicklywe’ll be forgotten. What endures is the idea we canendure. We hang these stories on a few fragilebranches of memory. This is where you aresupposed to be addressed with allusions tothe particulars. We are alive because each of usowns a word we keep trying to pronounce.I must go… Continue reading Richard Jaqckson
After all this love, after the birds rip like scissorsthrough the morning sky, after we leave, when the emptybed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake ofdisturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turnsto stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathinginside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far… Continue reading Richard Jackson
Sometimes it seems that all our words, even those for love,are written in another language. And yet they still arrive,distant, full of their own silences which may be whatallows us to invent another story, what saves us. What isthe word for the kind of love the woman shows now?A word that contains the whole story… Continue reading Richard Jackson
Those times we refused each other, we seemed to disappear. — Richard Jackson, from “Unable to Refuse,” The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)
In the pine woods […] north of herestarlight never touches the ground.Somewhere in there the cuckoo will begin to sing.I don’t think there is a moment we havethat is not taking place somewhere else,or a love that doesn’t lead us, sometimesdeftly, further from ourselves. — Richard Jackson, from “Worlds Apart,” The Heart as Framed: New… Continue reading Richard Jackson
The Vale of Soul-Making 