A Happy Place

but the way you dance by yourself on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful, so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair

sticking up from your head, it's your surprised body, pleasure I like. I can even say it, though only once and it won't

Deep Forest  -  Carl Hessmert ,   1920.

German 1869-1928

by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when, no, they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating planations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe.

by Raymond Carver