Don’t ask me why I came down to the water’s edge— hell, I was young, and I thought I knew life, I thought I could hold the darkness the way a man holds a cup of coffee before he wakens — Philip Levine, from “Here and Now,” Poetry (September 1977)
The twilight mist of tree and bush, Uncolored and unknown, Where leaf and petal float the air Bearing their shape, alone. — Janet Loxley Lewis, from “Child in a Garden,” Poetry (August 1932)
I am in my remembering. — Seán Ó Coileáin, from “The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey,” Poetry (vol. CCV, no. 2, November 2014)
If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name. — Philip Levine, from “How to Get There,” Poetry (February 2012)
Calm down, my Sorrow, we must move with care. / You called for evening; it descends, it’s here. — Charles Baudelaire, “Meditation,” trans, Robert Lowell, Poetry (September 1961)
A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery. — Mahmoud Darwish, from “To A Young Poet,” Poetry (March 2010)
Night falls and the empty intimacy of the whole world fills my heart to frothing. The past has trudged to this one spot and falls into the stream, its flashlight in its mouth. Ancient tears beneath the surface rise and scatter like carp, while an ivory hairpin floats away like a loose tooth going back… Continue reading Mary Ruefle
