The cities are falling asleep, each in its house

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

Image: Dmitry Anisimov 
Title: Czeslaw Milosz, from The Separate Notebooks

Caterpillar edging to moth

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life – that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry.  I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong.  Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding…In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change … But at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel.

— Mary Oliver, Long Life

Image: Chad Wys
Title: Barbara Guest, excerpt from “Passage"

Or I could call it a longing

 Cianalas: homesickness, longing, loneliness, melancholy

A’ dol dhachaigh: going home(wards)

Image: Found
Title: Mary Oliver

Her pockets full of lichens and seeds

   Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between
body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out

-Anne Carson, excerpt from “The Glass Essay”

Image: John B. Greene, Statue fragments
 

 

Title: Mary Oliver, from "Sleeping in the Forest"