Some favourite passages:
And the soul, if she is to know herself
must look into the soul and find
what kind of beast is hiding.
And the soul, if she is to know herself
must look into the soul and find
what kind of beast is hiding.
the opening stanza of "And the Soul"
I come from people who swear without realising they're swearing.
the opening line of "My People"
...and the lawn sits
in its shadows and dark and its falsehoods
and the ending begins with its terrible face,
its strange way of being, its short way of living....
from "I'm Thinking of My Father"
and if there was a moment
when I thought the body was a cage,
I knew it then....
*
Here is the loneliness of November
and its failure at an ending....
from "After Work"
Wouldn't any of us, if pushed, sit on the riverbank
and comb snakes from our hair, or think that in our grief
we could become a sea bird, our outstretched bodies
like a cross nailed to the wind?
from "Translation"
You ask
about birds, but all I can talk of is stones.
end of "How I Abandoned My Body to His Keeping"
Show me
how to recognise the glint in the eye of the dog,
the rabid dog. Remind me, O body, of the way
he moved when he drank, that dangerous silence.
Let me feel how I let my eyes drop, birds falling
from a sky, how my heart was a field, and there
was a dog, loose in the field, it was worrying
the sheep, they were running and then
they were still. O body, let me remember
what it was to have a field in my chest....
from "Body, Remember"
...when I knew fear was just a thing
to be bargained with, inside my feathered heart
was another feathered thing, born white but slowly
turning black, the way the crow in all the stories
was turned black for speaking truth.
end of "When I Was a Thing with Feathers"
In winter, in the fog,
sheep lie on the road for warmth
until the car is close enough
to breathe on them
and then they straighten their legs
and clatter away like coat hangers.
from "The Dead Tree"
...his eyes two leaves
of slowly changing colour.
end of "Chet Baker"
I can put on the heavy garments of the soul.
I can tether myself to the earth if I choose.
from "Give Me a Childhood"
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