Soul of Orion

“You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you — life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again.”

“When you reach for the stars, you are reaching for the farthest thing out there. When you reach deep into yourself, it is the same thing, but in the opposite direction. If you reach in both directions, you will have spanned the universe.”

...and this desire for human warmth.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. 

It’s so hard to speak and say things that cannot be said. It’s so silent.

“Each year is like putting a new coat over all the old ones. Sometimes I reach into the pockets of my childhood and pull things out.”

“To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”

“These poems teach me about the world, about how to look at things, and at each other, even if this looking injures me. Viktor Shklovsky famously notes, “Art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” As they are perceived and not as they are known… So the poet’s role is to speak truthfully, objectively, simply, to open the reader’s eyes to what is, not how it is deformed by thought… To restore life, to return us to the absurdity of being on earth, with other people.”

(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?)

How sublime the moon. How sublime, the mossy ruins. The fear and the fear itself.