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The first step... shall be to lose the way.
Galway Kinnell -
Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.
Galway Kinnell
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That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
Galway Kinnell -
I take a wolf's rib and whittleit sharp at both endsand coil it upand freeze it in blubber and place it outon the fairway of the bears.
Galway Kinnell -
When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.
Galway Kinnell -
Kiss the mouth which tells you, here,here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
Galway Kinnell -
Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell--their loneliness given away in poems, only their solitude kept.
Galway Kinnell -
I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.
Galway Kinnell
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The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shudderingfrom the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell -
The appeal to heaven breaks off.The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
Galway Kinnell -
Prose is walking; poetry is flying...
Galway Kinnell -
...this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.
Galway Kinnell -
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalkThe first song of his happiness, and the song wokeHis heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
Galway Kinnell -
Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness...
Galway Kinnell
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I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often.
Galway Kinnell -
Turn on the dream you lived through the unwavering gaze. It is as you thought: the living burn. In the floating days may you discover grace.
Galway Kinnell -
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
Galway Kinnell -
Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.
Galway Kinnell -
Let our scars fall in love.
Galway Kinnell -
It is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell
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I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now.
Galway Kinnell -
The rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
Galway Kinnell -
I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September.
Galway Kinnell -
Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?
Galway Kinnell