
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

May my silences become more accurate.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

The darkness has it's own light.

How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.

Over every mountain, there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.

In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

A mind too active is no mind at all.

What falls away is always. And is near.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

I do not laugh; I do not cry; I'm sweating out the will to die. My past is sliding down the drain; I soon will be myself again.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.

The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.

The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.

Love is not love until love´s vulnerable.

I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet.

(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)

I trust all joy

Self-contemplation is a curse That makes an old confusion worse.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

From I Knew a Woman I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!

What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

I fear those shadows most that start from my own feet.

My father is a fish.

When true love broke my heart in half, I took the whiskey from the shelf, And told my neighbors when to laugh. I keep a dog, and bark myself.

Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs, Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.

The two duties are to lament or praise.

What grace I have is enough.

Love makes me naked; Propinquity's a harsh master; O the songs we hide singing to ourselves!

Necessity starves on the stoop of invention.

My bones whisper to my blood; my sleep deceives me.

A house for wisdom, a field for revelation. Speak to the stars, and the stars answer. At first the visible obscures: Go where the light is.

Maybe God has a house. But not here.

The Mistake He left his pants upon a chair: She was a widow, so she said: But he was apprehended, bare, By one who rose up from the dead.

She moves as water moves, and comes to me, Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

From The Auction I left my home with unencumbered will And all the rubbish of confusion sold.

From Open House My truths are all foreknown, This anguish self-revealed. I'm naked to the bone, With nakedness my shield. Myself is what I wear: I keep the spirit spare.

Brooding on God, I may become a man.