Good Lines

Some days, when I'm really busy or stressed or sad, or when I just don't have the quiet space in the day to write something good, I like to read my favorite lines. Here are a few that I've collected recently in my journal:

• "It never ends, this brutal way we crack / our lives across our backs." - Richard Hugo, from his poem "A Night at the Napi in Browning" (lines 1-2 of the third/last stanza)
• "Oh to break loose, like a chinook / salmon jumping and falling back, / nosing up to the impossible / stone and bone-crushing waterfall - / raw-jawed, weak fleshed there, stopped by ten / steps of the roaring ladder, and then / to clear the top on the last try, / alive enough to spawn and die. - Robert Lowell, the original opening stanza (when first published in The New Yorker) for "Waking Early Sunday Morning"
• "Bright sun of my bright day, / I thank God for being alive -- / a way of writing I once thought heartless." - Robert Lowell, from "Logan Airport, Boston"

. . . and from Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning" ~

• from section I: . . . late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the freedom of a cockatoo" (lines 1-3) . . . "Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet" (line 13)
• and all but the first three lines of section II, (lines 19-30...my favorite!): [Note: this is actually supposed to be single-spaced]

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be considered like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures for her soul.