“Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.”
Author: Christina's Words
“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford
“Echo and Narcissus” by Kim Addonizio
Poor love-struck Echo, stuck with repeating
everything he said. He might
have thought he deserved it,
to have a nymph for a girlfriend, who’d confirm
everything he said; he might
have loved how she mirrored him,
a girlfriend who’d say You’re pretty
when he told her she was pretty,
who’d love him more than her mirror.
Not that they had mirrors in those days;
that was the problem. Anyway, she was pretty,
but he wasn’t interested in nymphs.
If only they’d had mirrors in those days
he wouldn’t have drowned in that reflecting pool,
finding it more interesting than nymphs.
But maybe he’d have beat his head against a mirror
and killed himself anyway, pool or no pool.
No free will in those days—it was all the gods.
You could beat your head against your fate, but still,
if you were Narcissus, you’d end up a white flower
stuck in the ground with no will, plucked or trampled by gods,
and someone would say it was deserved,
for beauty to come down to a white flower,
a poor echo, and someone’s love stuck
in the ground, the ground, the ground, the ground.
—Kim Addonizio, “Echo and Narcissus” via The ThreePennyReview
“I write your name for the last time in this mist …
I write your name for the last time in this mist,
White breath on the windowpane,
And watch it vanish. No, it stays there.
―Charles Wright, from “White” in Country Music: Selected Early Poems.
“My Many Disguises” by Richard Jackson
There’s a bit of leftover sun blowing around on the corner.
There’s the quivering branch the robin has just left.
Nothing is complete until we can see it. Even the trees
hold their breath. It may seem forever until you arrive.
There’s the prison of my shadow, these words which are
roadblocks, their elliptical emotions, the night’s refusals.
It may mean the dead need us, after all, to say the unsayable,
to hold in our hands a simple rose, to cup the wind, to feel
the endless longing the heart brings back from its inverted
world, that world whose destiny encases your every breath.
– Richard Jackson, closing lines to “My Many Disguises,” (full poem) from Out of Place: Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)
“I need my small, meaningless lies. …
“I need my small, meaningless lies. I need all my self-created semi-truths. It’s the only way for me to keep exclusive parts of myself to myself. Believe me, I do not even perceive them as lies. It’s something different that keeps happening inside my head. At the same time, I long to tell you the truth about me, always. I want to share with you each important or unimportant detail and feel and fully embrace the very act of sharing. But it occurs to me that it’s the hardest of tasks; I hate it. I hate unveiling bits and pieces of anything permanent or temporary that resides in me. I loathe it with my heart. You can find more honesty in the smallest of my gestures rather in my words; my words are too impatient, too loose, too doomed in some way.”
– Anaïs Nin
Words ... for the Time Being 