A Paradise of Poems

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I miss...

I am nothing I shall always be nothing I cannot wish to be anything. Aside from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world. Windows of my room, The room of one of the world's millions nobody knows about (And if they knew about me, what would they know?) Open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people, To a street inaccessible to any thought, Real, impossibly real, certain,...

I like for you to be still It is as though you are absent And you hear me from far away And my voice does not touch you It seems as though your eyes had flown away And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth As all things are filled with my soul You emerge from the things Filled with my soul You are like my soul A butterfly of dream And you are like the word: Melancholy I like for you to be sti...

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everythin...

As I walked out one evening,    Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement    Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river    I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway:    'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you    Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over t...

I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. ...... All this I did wit...

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my m...

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old gr...

I do not love you except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, From waiting to not waiting for you My heart moves from cold to fire. I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly. Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel Ray,...

If tomorrow starts without me, and I'm not there to see, If the sun should rise and find your eyes all filled with tears for me; I wish so much you wouldn't cry the way you did today, while thinking of the many things we didn't get to say. I know how much you care for me, and how much I care for you, and each time that you think of me I know you'll miss me too; But when tomorrow starts without me,...

A baked potato of a winter’s night to wrap your hands around or burn your mouth. A blanket knitted by your mother’s cunning fingers. Or your grandmother’s. A smile, a touch, trust, as you walk in from the snow or return to it, the tips of your ears pricked pink and frozen. The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house. To surface from dreams in a bed, burrowed beneath blankets and co...

If he throws away every opportunity in life and crushes the affection and the patience of his friends and then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot, and finally persists, in spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense but not any genius, persists in going up some infamous back alley dying in rags and dirt, he is beyond all question a genius. But above all things, to deftly throw t...

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. Here a great personal deed has room, (Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men, Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.) Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom...

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light: A...

I said to Poetry: “I’m finished with you.” Having to almost die before some weird light comes creeping through is no fun. “No thank you, Creation, no muse need apply. I’m out for good times – at the very least, some painless convention.” Poetry laid back and played dead until this morning. I wasn’t sad or anything, only restless. Poetry said: “You remember the desert, and how glad you were that yo...

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and...

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedest...

unaccountably we are alone forever alone and it was meant to be that way, it was never meant to be any other way– and when the death struggle begins the last thing I wish to see is a ring of human faces hovering over me– better just my old friends, the walls of my self, let only them be there. I have been alone but seldom lonely. I have satisfied my thirst at the well of my self and that wine was...

Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing? This winter the loons came to our harbor and died, one by one, of nothing we could see. A friend told me of one on the shore that lifted its head and opened the elegant beak and cried out in the long, sweet savoring of its life which, if you have heard it, you know is a sacred thing., and for which, if you have not heard it, you had better hurr...

I want to sleep the dream of the apples, to withdraw from the tumult of cemetries. I want to sleep the dream of that child who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood, that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water. I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass, nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth that labors before dawn. I...

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the m...

Do not carry your remembrance. Leave it, alone, in my breast, tremor of a white cherry tree in the torment of January. There divides me from the dead a wall of difficult dreams. I give the pain of a fresh lily for a heart of chalk. All night long, in the orchard my eyes, like two dogs. All night long, quinces of poison, flowing. Sometimes the wind is a tulip of fear, a sick tulip, daybreak of wint...

On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bod...

Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again Painting their black silhouettes on an open sky. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart. Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire ha...

if you’re going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don’t even start. if you’re going to try, go all the way. this could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. go all the way. it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days. it could mean freezing on a park bench. it could mean jail, it could mean derision, mockery, isolation. isolation is the gift, all the others are a test...