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41 " Flying HomeAs this plane dragged its track of used ozone half the world long thrusts some four hundred of us toward places where actual known people live and may wait,we diminish down in our seats, disappeared into novels of lives clearer than ours, and yet we do not forget for a moment the life down there, the doorway each will soon enter: where I will meet her again and know her again, dark radiance with, and then mostly without, the stars.Very likely she has always understood what I have slowly learned, and which only now, after being away, almost as far away as one can get on this globe, almost as far as thoughts can carry - yet still in her presence, still surrounded not so much by reminders of her as by things she had already reminded me of, shadows of her cast forward and waiting - can I try to express: that love is hard, that while many good things are easy, true love is not, because love is first of all a power, its own power, which continually must make its way forward, from night into day, from transcending union always forward into difficult day. And as the plane descends, it comes to me in the space where tears stream down across the stars, tears fallen on the actual earth where their shining is what we call spirit, that once the lover recognizes the other, knows for the first time what is most to be valued in another, from then on, love is very much like courage, perhaps it is courage, and even perhaps only courage. Squashed out of old selves, smearing the darkness of expectation across experience, all of us little thinkers it brings home having similar thoughts of landing to the imponderable world, the transoceanic airliner, resting its huge weight down, comes in almost lightly, to where with sudden, tiny, white puffs and long, black, rubberish smears all its tires know the home ground. "
― Galway Kinnell
42 " Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hairin the Moonlight1You scream, waking from a nightmare.When I sleepwalkinto your room, and pick you up,and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to mehard,as if clinging could save us. I thinkyou thinkI will never die, I think I exudeto you the permanence of smoke or stars,even asmy broken arms heal themselves around you.2I have heard you tellthe sun, don't go down, I have stood byas you told the flower, don't grow old,don't die. Little Maud,I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,I would suck the rot from your fingernail,I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,I would let nothing of you go, ever,until washerwomenfeel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,and rats walk away from the culture of the plague,and iron twists weapons toward truth north,and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress,and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her in the dark.And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,this the nightmare you wake screaming from:being foreverin the pre-trembling of a house that falls.3In a restaurant once, everyonequietly eating, you clambered upon my lap: to allthe mouthfuls rising towardall the mouths, at the top of your voiceyou criedyour one word, caca! caca! caca!and each spoonfulstopped, a moment, in midair, in its witheringsteam.Yes,you cling becauseI, like you, only soonerthan you, will go downthe path of vanished alphabets,the roadlessnessto the other side of the darkness,your armslike the shoes left behind,like the adjectives in the halting speechof old folk,which once could call up the lost nouns.4And you yourself,some impossible Tuesdayin the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk outamong the black stonesof the field, in the rain,and the stones sayingover their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,and the raindropshitting you on the fontanelover and over, and you standing thereunable to let them in.5If one day it happensyou find yourself with someone you lovein a café at one endof the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc barwhere wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,and if you commit then, as we did, the errorof thinking,one day all this will only be memory,learn to reach deeperinto the sorrowsto come—to touchthe almost imaginary bonesunder the face, to hear under the laughterthe wind crying across the black stones. Kissthe mouththat tells you, here,here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.The still undanced cadence of vanishing.6In the light the moonsends back, I can see in your eyesthe hand that waved oncein my father's eyes, a tiny kitewobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:and the angelof all mortal things lets go the string.7Back you go, into your crib.The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.Your eyes close inside your head,in sleep. Alreadyin your dreams the hours begin to sing.Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together amongthe ten thousand things,each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wagesof dying is love. "
43 " Wait, for now.Distrust everything if you have to.But trust the hours. Haven’t theycarried you everywhere, up to now?Personal events will become interesting again.Hair will become interesting.Pain will become interesting.Buds that open out of season will become interesting.Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;their memories are what give themthe need for other hands. The desolationof lovers is the same: that enormous emptinesscarved out of such tiny beings as we areasks to be filled; the needfor the new love is faithfulness to the old.Wait.Don’t go too early.You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.But no one is tired enough.Only wait a little and listen:music of hair,music of pain,music of looms weaving our loves again.Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,most of all to hear your whole existence,rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. "
― Galway Kinnell , Mortal Acts Mortal Words
44 " And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,this the nightmare you wake screaming from:being foreverin the pre-trembling of a house that falls. "
― Galway Kinnell , The Book of Nightmares
45 " The Lord turned away washingHis hands without soap and waterLike a common housefly. "
― Galway Kinnell , A New Selected Poems
46 " Now is when the point of the story changes. "
47 " My tongue goes to the Secretary of the Deadto tell the corpses, "I'm sorry, fellows,the killing was just one of those thingsdifficult to pre-visualize - like a cow,say, getting hit by lightning. "
48 " Wait"Wait, for now.Distrust everything, if you have to.But trust the hours. Haven’t theycarried you everywhere, up to now?Personal events will become interesting again.Hair will become interesting.Pain will become interesting.Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,their memories are what give themthe need for other hands. And the desolationof lovers is the same: that enormous emptinesscarved out of such tiny beings as we areasks to be filled; the needfor the new love is faithfulness to the old.Wait.Don’t go too early.You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.But no one is tired enough.Only wait a while and listen.Music of hair,Music of pain,music of looms weaving all our loves again.Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,most of all to hear,the flute of your whole existence,rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. "
49 " Two Set Out on Their JourneyWe sit side by side,brother and sister, and readthe book of what will be, while a breezeblows the pages over—desolate odd, cheerful even,and otherwise. When we cometo our own story, the happy beginning,the ending we don’t know yet,the ten thousand actsencumbering the days between,we will read every page of it.If an ancestor has presseda love-flower for us, it will lie hiddenbetween pages of the slow going,where only those who adore the storyever read. When the time comesto shut the book and set out,we will take childhood’s laughteras far as we can into the days to come,until another laughter sounds backfrom the place where our next bodieswill have risen and will be tellingtales of what seemed deadly serious once,offering to us oldening wayfarers the light heart, now made of timeand sorrow, that we started with. "
50 " Flower Herding On Mount Monadnock In the forest I discover a flower.The invisible life of the thingGoes up in flames that are invisible, Like cellophane burning in the sunlight.It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing.In its covertness it has a wayOf uttering itself in place of itself,Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean,A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground.The appeal to heaven breaks off.The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying. "
51 " How Could You Not - for Jane KenyonIt is a day after many days of storms.Having been washed and washed, the air glitters;small heaped cumuli blow across the sky; a showervisible against the firs douses the crocuses.We knew it would happen one day this week.Now, when I learn you have died, I goto the open door and look across at New Hampshireand see that there, too, the sun is brightand clouds are making their shadowy ways along the horizon;and I think: How could it not have been today?In another room, Keri Te Kanawa is singingthe Laudate Dominum of Mozart, very faintly,as if in the past, to those who once satin the steel seat of the old mowing machine,cheerful descendent of the scythe of the grim reaper,and drew the cutter bars littlereciprocating triangles through the grassto make the stalks lie down in sunshine.Could you have walked in the dark early this morningand found yourself grown completely tiredof the successes and failures of medicine,of your year of pain and despair remitted brieflynow and then by hope that had that leaden taste?Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved itand see that, now, it was not wrong to dieand that, on dying, you would leaveyour beloved in a day like paradise?Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little?How could you not already have felt blessed for good,having these last days spoken your whole heart to him,who spoke his whole heart to you, so that in the silencehe would not feel a single word was missing?How could you not have slipped into a spell,in full daylight, as he lay next to you,with his arms around you, as they have been,it must have seemed, all your life?How could your cheek not press a moment to his cheek,which presses itself to yours from now on?How could you not rise and go, with all that lightat the window, those arms around you, and the sound,coming or going, hard to say, of a single-engineplane in the distance that no one else hears? "
52 " The last memory I haveIs of a flower which cannot be touched,Through the bloom of which, all day,Fly crazed, missing bees. from “Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock "
― Galway Kinnell , Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock
53 " When one has lived a long time alone,one wants to live again among men and women,to return to that place where one's ties with the humanbroke, where the disquiet of death and now alsoof history glimmers its firelight on faces,where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gazeof the great granny, and where lovers speak,on lips blowsy from kissing, that languagethe same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreakblether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,until the sun has risen, and they standin the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,when one has lived a long time alone. "
― Galway Kinnell , When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone