Does the road wind up-hill all the way?    Yes, to the very end.

How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little, 0104  Lest you may mar your fortunes.

With a first line taken from the tv listings

Each year as heavy rainfalls flood the valleys, spill over gulches, slide the foundations of overpriced houses, invade sewage pipes and send brown water runoff to the ocean, the king tides roll in, higher in its warming, lingering longer and breaking through sandbags and barricades, eroding the resorts. This is not the end of civilization, but a return to one.

Soon it will be fifteen years

We are little kids that just watched Indiana Jones and so we find some old bungee cords and the hooks of those bungee cords find themselves into our belt loops and we tie the other side’s around the tree and now we are

I placed a jar in Tennessee,    And round it was, upon a hill.    It made the slovenly wilderness    Surround that hill.

All our journeys nearing Space Skirt it with care, Shying at the distances Present in air.

The seven days war that put the world to sleep,

You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe.

it got too much hip, too much bone, too much conga, too much cuatro to two step, got too many piano keys in between her teeth it got too much clave too much hand clap, got too much salsa to sit still

Where thoughts serenely sweet express, How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

Do not remember me as disaster nor as the keeper of secrets I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars watching you move slowly out of my bed    saying we cannot waste time only ourselves.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied    Who told me time would ease me of my pain!    I miss him in the weeping of the rain;    I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side,    And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;    But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.    There are a hundred places where I fear    To go,—so with his memory they brim.    And entering with relief some quiet place    Where never fell his foot or shone his face    I say, “There is no memory of him here!”    And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Wait. I have made them up—all of them— and when I say I am married, it means I married all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves. Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

So much of any year is flammable,    lists of vegetables, partial poems.    Orange swirling flame of days,    so little is a stone.

In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

We huddled around a quivering soy sauce dish to see it move through the Ouija board.

I always like summerbestyou can eat fresh cornfrom daddy's gardenand okraand greensand cabbageand lots ofbarbecueand buttermilkand homemade ice-creamat the church picnicand listen togospel musicoutsideat the churchhomecomingand go to the mountains withyour grandmotherand go barefootedand be warmall the timenot only when you go to bedand sleep

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they rak'd up, And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold, To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach.

it will be summer and my god I’ll say hello to people who don’t live in my house,

Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn, and you can trace your last homecoming into the snow or the sun.

No science. No design. Nothing taken  Gently into his hand or your hand or mine,  Nothing we erect is our own.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Yesterday is torn in shreds. Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes Rip apart the breathing beds. Hear bones crack and pulverize. Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Next day she cooks she feeds her kids she dreams… Knowing Aladdin’s trapped

His whole instinct is to hunt, Mine to free the meaning pent.

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world. Then we took it for granted.

And for twelve years more he continued to fight.

of what was already less a copy than a shadow–the original

It will be well for those who seek the favor, the comfort from our father in heaven, where a battlement bulwarks us all.

That passed over,     this can too.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

untamed by narrative and unbound by books.

I felt the hollow thud-thudding of his heart, the pain of resurrected hope. He reached towards the book and the book reached back towards him, because books need to be read quite as much as we need to read them, and it had been a very long time since this particular book had been out of the roll-top desk in the Special Collections room. Dark fingers touched green-dyed cloth, and it was like two sundered halves of some broken thing finally reuniting, like a lost key finally turning in its lock. Every book in the library rustled in unison, sighing at the sacred wholeness of reader and book.