sad girls inherit the earth

“the sea & beach move into each other’s mouths particle by particle; each one wanders the big rooms of the other. O, god, let us love like they love.”

“If poets are the keepers of the unsayable, then silence, not language, is a poet’s natural element, the realm where the unsayable lives. Poets fetishize silence as much as words; they are disturbed and comforted by the sounds that interrupt it. This is what John Keats means by Negative Capability, his notion of a poet’s basic qualification, the need for ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ This a fancy way of describing ambivalence, also a basic qualification fro a poet, the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless. The hidden subject of all poems is the silence that surrounds them, the things that can’t be, that will never be said; a real poem points to everything beyond it.”

“A hysteric is a girl who can’t be / disappeared”

“This world is cruel, even to itself, The white lilies prey on the blue.”

i work hard at managing, grateful 
and spare. i try to forgive all trespasses 
and give thanks for the desert. rejoice 
in being alive here in my simple world. 
each evening i walk for an hour, paying 
attention to real things. the plover 
sweeping at my face to get me away from its ground nest. an ant carrying the wing of a butterfly like a flag in the wind. 
a grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper. the antelope close up, just staring at me. back in the house, i lie down in the heat for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard for the wounded. near the border, between this country and the next one.

“When I speak to you of love I do not speak as I am but as I am in love with you which is better that I am, better than I can hope to be.”

“All my love—and all its ashes.”

I love you like a vulture loves / the careless deer at the roadside.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me.