The Descent Quotes

“Heaven, Which is

I have not handled the ordinary well
And wandered into much time spent
Taking on the unfaithful,

Blunder and flaw. And stayed with it, in the face
Of you who cuts across all landscape,
Who quivers my legs until unable to anymore

Stand and I lie down in an open field,
Wait. Edge and much sky like invitation.
To stay for who comes with message, as in the midst

Of battle, breathless, the coat a little
Torn and in disarray but getting the word out,
Which is how I was finally not for you, which is

What made me irrevocable. No one shall have
What they first believed, and then beyond.
The trail is the story and is

What saves us from going back
To the beginning when we could only see
The other. Through paradise

Was and paradise
Must fail. One of us might look
Down or the corner of an eye catch

Movement, a glint, astray. Heaven is only
What it cannot be: either in its zero, its finish
Of balance, or entirely slipped

To one side. Not as a place to discover
Anything: the blank page, the white,
Noise, the raw of just being there.”
― Sophie Cabot Black, The Descent: Poems

“Holy

At the cross of the cross
Is the part that holds. Two roads
Meet; after that is the work of continuing

On. Beyond intersection
Lies departure, which is then to see
What goes on without you, what

Does not go wrong. Once tree reconciles
Against another; arm over arm…”
― Sophie Cabot Black, The Descent: Poems

“The Climb

I will be done with mountains. Let
The subsequent come, the fallen stone.
Let blazes heal, let erosion. Having marked

Certain places, it becomes easier to rest
On the way back down. What name to leave
This flower (or keep nameless), what small rock

To bring back to where I will write you
Of how it was, getting whatever remained
Up to the site we thought highest. The mountain

Does not move; nothing I can say
Will move it. Beyond are only more mountains
Conspiring as if to break free. And I cannot hear

For the noise of breath; each finger uncurls
And one blue flower where trees refuse to live.”
― Sophie Cabot Black, The Descent: Poems

“The Tree

And when we woke it was like nothing
Ever dreamt before this: wrist, neck,
The hollows behind the knee, your hair

Filling my hands, all of it while we turned
And turned until we were unforgivable,
Adamant with bark, as if a wayward god had come

Upon us, bewitching breast to breast, fingers
Still tracing a vein, a thigh
No longer intent on destination

But in the keep of one limb resting on another, breath
Lingering in leaves, at the edge of the road
Where we were once lost, your hand faithful

In its nest, your mouth on my mouth
Caught, our feet tangled, looking for earth.”
― Sophie Cabot Black, The Descent: Poems

“Home

Down from the search, the long recitals of ridge
Which are about solitude: cloudburst, a lament of wind
To vigil through, to move first by reason

Then grow wild in the thin grass, over fossil
And nowhere to lie without some animal
To find me. Perhaps too much has happened to return,

Or no one will ask. Down from the higher country,
Leaving steep meadows behind, the shifts
Of snow making a way to the river,
How stone by stone the cairns come undone,

No longer legible. And in the last light
The forest I must cross
Becomes many houses, a mist
Rising from each tree like hearthsmoke.”
― Sophie Cabot Black, The Descent: Poems

“In Light of All

In light of all that has happened
Which you didn’t want to have happen, remember
It was going to happen even as you believed

It could never happen
And as far as knowing what happens next,
Nothing can be done except whatever possible

To make what you want to have happen,
To also be present while it is happening
To be there and to be able to say you were,

And to write it down for someone else to know
They do not know what is happening
So they can say they know what happened

While the light in which all that has happened
Happened in so many ways that finally the light
Became what happened.”
― Sophie Cabot Black, The Descent: Poems