What you understand no longer matters.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.

Some questions cannot be answered.

They become familiar weights in the hand,

round stones pulled from the pocket,

unyielding and cool.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read -- in such a moment, anything can happen.

How sad they are,

the promises we never return to.

They stay in our mouths,

roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.

Always there is desire,

only the shape

of what is desired shifts,

each love giving way to another.

Solitude, whether endured or embraced, is a necessary gateway to original thought.

Poems carry shimmer, multiplicity, undertow, mystery, kites of meaning and feeling so elusive they cannot be seen, yet they tauten the string that holds them.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, interview, Poetry Northwest, July 11, 2015

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

A scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.

I carry this in my body, seed

in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.

But they guard me, these small pains,

from growing sure

of myself and perhaps forgetting.

Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.

Only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality -- the fear of self-revelation.

Whatever is split

will carry its shadow, that second road,

its yellow leaves falling and falling

in the steep woods of our hundred other lives.

Silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,

right solitude oils it.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

The moonlight builds its cold chapel

again out of piecemeal darkness.

It's easy to say yes to being happy, but it's harder to agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

How else learn the real,

if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.

What some could not have escaped

others will find by decision.

Near even a candle, the visible heat.

So it is with a person in love.

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.

The same words

Come from each mouth

differently.

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

Happiness and unhappiness

differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one pressed in tin ...

Each carries the same water.

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,

being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

Leave a door open long enough,

a cat will enter.

Leave food, it will stay.

In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.

Call one thing another's name long enough,

it will answer.

Under each station of the real,

another glimmers.

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