death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life. —Louise Glück

 

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The body is at home in time and space
and loves things, 
how they come and go, and such
distances as it might cross or place
between the things it loves, and its own touch.

But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error
like some weird pearl, everything is wrong.
Space is stone, and time a breakneck terror
where you hold to nothing but your own small song.

No wonder you would rather stay asleep
than wake again to your live burial.

But sometimes, shrinking in your tiny keep
you make out through the thousand-mile-thick wall
the faint tapped code of one as trapped as you,
saying: those high white mansions—I dream them too—

—Don Paterson

Burial

Ploughshares, Spring 2011

.   .   .

 

My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, it is bigger than the sea, it holds the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Hand, Cup, Shell

.   .   .

Hold faith, for within the soul is the homing device.

We all can find our way back.

—Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Women who Run with the Wolves

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Louise Glück, October

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from Afterword

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Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.

And the sun says yes.

And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.


–Louise Glück

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wild iris

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 At the end of my suffering  
 there was a door.

 Hear me out: that which you call death
 I remember.

 Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
 Then nothing. The weak sun
 flickered over the dry surface.

 It is terrible to survive
 as consciousness
 buried in the dark earth.

 Then it was over: that which you fear, being
 a soul and unable
 to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
 bending a little.  And what I took to be
 birds darting in low shrubs.

 You who do not remember
 passage from the other world
 I tell you I could speak again: whatever
 returns from oblivion returns
 to find a voice:

 from the center of my life came
 a great fountain, deep blue
 shadows on azure sea water.


–Louise Glück

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