A Settlement Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turnedinto this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have comeup trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting theircurvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have comehome, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,happiness, music, ambition. And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere togo and… Continue reading Mary Oliver
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain. ― Mark Strand, Blizzard of One (Knopf, February 8, 2000)
He’s freed from his loneliness by the word. Isn’t that the point of poetry? Breaking through the walls of solitude. Poetry is the great S.O.S. of loneliness. — Anna Kamieńska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook,” Poetry; Mar2011, Vol. 197 Issue 6, p503
Lose myself in your blueberry eyes Magnolia, kiss your mauve lips of grapes, squeeze your fleshy, milky macaroon breasts, smell your opium breath of subconsciousness, labyrinth of desires. ― Laura Gentile, Seraphic Addiction. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform August 17, 2013)
I lied a little. There are things I don’t want to tell you. How lonely I am today and sick at heart. How the rain falls steadily and cold on a garden grown greener, more lush and even less tame. I haven’t done much, I confess, to contain it. The grapevine, as usual, threatens everything… Continue reading Madelon Sprengnether
Comes down from the mountain the cream-colored horse, comes across dun fields and steps lightly into the house, and stands in the bright living room cloud-like and silent. And now, without warning, the gray arm of the wind takes him away. “I loved that horse,” thought the poet. “I could have loved anything, but I… Continue reading Mark Strand
Oh, the body—its hungers, needs, and limitations. You look at somebody and you realize that they’re in there, inside there, somewhere, and how will you ever reach them, understand them? — Richard Siken, from “Love From a Distance,” Spork issue 1.2
I shut that black wing from my heart. That bad bad bird. I slam the light. Wrong love, it flaps, wrong love. I slit the curtains of my eyes. If one more death makes room for one more death, I’ve died enough. I’ve died in rooms that bird screeched through, the blood-tipped feathers in my… Continue reading Cecilia Woloch
I myself have started to feel the onset of something, a sadness perhaps, the dawn of a new season, and existence even. But enough of this. Tell me about yourself and what it is like where you are. Do the leaves ever stop falling? Are the shadows ever anything but long? — Mark Strand, from… Continue reading Mark Strand
Open Letter to Neil Armstrong Dear Neil Armstrong, I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall. I need answers I think only you might have. When you were a boy, and space was simple science fiction, when flying was merely a daydream between periods of History and Physics, when gifts of moon… Continue reading Mike McGee
The Vale of Soul-Making 