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"You I Have No Distance From"
I can't remember what it was like before I met you. Was I always like this? I remember myself lost. I know that for sure. Wandering. Moving from one wild woman to the next. Staying, sometimes, just long enough to understand that their bewilderment was more pronounced than mine. At least that's the way they put it across. But I can't remember being this nervous before; this frazzled. I'd watch them from a distance: taking stoned sponge baths in their sinks; shaving black hash balls with razor blades; moving like slow-motion queens. Then they'd change into backyard girls from long ago, giggling and tucking their long legs up under themselves: the way they'd plunk down on their soft heels and then toss their hair likes horses switch their tails.
But you I have no distance from. Every move you make feels like I'm traveling in your skin; every glance you take out the window, as though you were completely alone and dreaming in some other time. It does no good to wave my arms. Now everything's reversed.
-- Sam Shepard
Love is not two people looking into each other's eyes, but two people looking ahead in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
-- William Blake
"Moccasin Flowers"
All my life,
so far,
I have loved
more than one thing,
including the mossy hooves
of dreams, including
the spongy littler
under the tall trees.
In spring
the moccasin flowers
reach for the crackling
lick of the sun
and burn down. Sometimes,
in the shadows,
I see the hazy eyes,
the lamb-lips
of oblivion,
its deep drowse,
and I can imagine a new nothing
in the universe,
the matted leaves splitting
open, revealing
the black planks
of the stairs.
But all my life -- so far --
I have loved best
how the flowers rise
and open, how
the pink lungs of their bodies
enter the fire of the world
and stand there shining
and willing -- the one
thing they can do before
they shuffle forward
into the floor of darkness, they
become the trees.
-- Mary Oliver
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