excavating inside

In a dark time the eye begins to see.
-   Theodore Roethke 

Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

Taken from A Clenched Soul- by Pablo Neruda

PARIS.

They say the world is round, and yet

I often think it square,

So many little hurts we get

From corners here and there.

From Life’s Scars by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

painting: jamie romanet

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.

XXIX L2-3  Shakespeare

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul 

from the 3rd stanza I heard a funeral in my brain by Emily Dickinson

If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has 
swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

~Hidden by Naomi Shihab Nye

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

~Robert Frost.. Fire and Ice

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

Emily dickinson

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe— From The Raven

This is the first thing

I have understood

Time is an echo of an axe

Within a wood.

~Philip Larkin~ This is the first thing I understood

I adore this little jem!!!

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

From Walt Whitman’s ~Song of Myself

painting: jamie romanet

These fish have no eyes 
these silver fish that come to me in dreams, 
scattering their roe and milt 
in the pockets of my brain.

But there's one that comes-- 
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest, 
that simply holds against the current,

closing its dark mouth against 
the current, closing and opening 
as it holds to the current.