Blue Willow Moon

“More spoke to him from the soft wild night

“Poetry both arises from and invites states of deep listening. A poet must attune their ear both to the voice of their imagination, where the poem originates, and to the sounds of their material, language, where the poem manifests. So, too, when we read a poem, we listen both to the speaker’s voice, as it shapes itself in words, and to our inner response to that voice, the way the poem resonates inside us. And when a poem is explicitly about the act of listening, we have another layer to attend to: our awareness of the poet’s awareness.”

“He missed being with her. He missed being.”

“Poems are like mirrors: we see ourselves in them. Just as when we read about a character in a novel facing a moral dilemma and can’t help asking ourselves how we would choose, when we read a powerful poem we can’t help feeling, to one degree or another, what the poet feels. There is a kind of limbic resonance, or emotional attunement, between poet and reader. When we read deeply, we experience the poem from the inside, as if what’s happening in the poem is happening to us; as if we are seeing, thinking, and feeling what the poet is seeing, thinking, and feeling. The best poems make us feel that the poet is describing our experience rather than their own. How did they know that I felt this way? How did they allow me to see what I already knew but didn’t know that I knew? We see ourselves in poems.“

“Something like my soul slips from me

“He awoke with her touching him, and thought this must be how the wall feels in morning light.”

“When the sun enters the room, he wakes and watches her.

“While we were not looking

“The stars do not blow away as we do.”