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Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.
August of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sun
I have just said something ridiculous to you and in response, your glorious laughter. These are the days the sun is swimming back
So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience.
Listen to me or not, it hardly matters. I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish. I’m just chattering.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Well, there’s life, and then there’s later. Maybe it’s myself that I miss.
and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not, how shall I correct it?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.
We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left.
It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life—just imagine that! You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
who knows to what furious, pitiful extent— banished ourselves.
Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless.
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
It could mean something. It could mean everything.
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many.
In matters of love of this kind there are things we long to do but must not do.
My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.
Softest of mornings, hello. And what will you do today, I wonder, to my heart? And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder, before it must break?
Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive strikes me from sleep, and I rise from the comfortable bed and go to another room, where my books are lined up in their neat and colorful rows. How magical they are!
Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk.
June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.
do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
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.
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!”
The snow began here this morning and all day continued, its white rhetoric everywhere calling us back to why, how, whence such beauty and what the meaning; such an oracular fever!
I know several lives worth living.
I come down from Red Rock, lips streaked black, fingers purple, throat cool, shirt full of fernfingers, head full of windy whistling.
2. Early Morning in Ohio A late snowfall. In the white morning the trains whistle and bang in the freightyard, shifting track, getting ready to get on with it, to roll out into the country again, to get far away from here and closer to somewhere else. A
