Quotes from Richard Jackson

Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.

We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor.

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

The memory of things become the reality of things. Or maybe the past is not permanent. Maybe the tree has said its fill, and leaves us with an image of ourselves.

The heart sags. My footprints forget me. I don't think anything will ever be the same. This is the edge of the cliff and you can't move, can't jump. Everything is vertical. With binoculars you can see where you'll be in an hour. Raindrops collect on the lens. A fine mist. It hides us. It drifts into clocks. Gravity presses your hands. Some hurts never get said. Some get smuggled.

The thing is to sift out the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment for the sentence.

Last night, the stars on the water were trap doors. The crows with their charred wings are complaining to a hawk. It's time to pack up the sunsets the dawns and move on.

The early bats are tying the air, the heart, into knots. They fly on the wings of grief. The late butterfly follows them over the edge of the cliff where the earth becomes the air we turn into. It's called mirror vision when we see what isn't here. The kind of faith that fails at unexpected moments the way a climber reaches for a hold that will never in his life, be there. It's called despair when we open the door of a heart that no longer exists.

I thought, then, that I could see your own soul in the constant waves tearing unconcerned at the impenetrable dunes. I wanted, then, to believe the moon is a flower, fragrant, its stem tossed across the water. It was then that I entered some other world, the way your life wakes suddenly in the middle of the night to find your own worn-out dreams lying in sheets around you...

Light staggers through the trees. Every moment is filled with other moments.

What escapes you, never leaves you. Everything is a journey of trust. You have to have the kind of faith the flame has for the candle, that the bird has for its wings. Otherwise, our words have no destinations. Otherwise, our words are snakes that swallow our souls. —Richard Jackson, from "Isaac's Consent," Out of Place: Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)

Can you imagine a silence so desperate to be heard?

Suddenly it seems memory is impossible. Who can say what fills the coffin of the moment? Are we, then, like moths at a candle, glowing longer than life is left in us? I don't know how much longer it is possible to stay in a poem like this one, sifting through the ashes of the future. —Richard Jackson, from "Possibility," Heartwall (University of Massachuetts Press, 2000)

Those times we refused each other, we seemed to disappear. — Richard Jackson, from "Unable to Refuse," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor.

We come from a place that has always been inside us. Our words migrate helplessly. The world reflects only itself. Which is why we have to create our own memories.

There are desires we haven't named yet, loves so impossible they have to be true. — Richard Jackson, from "Incompleteness," The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

I imagined a dark world where the stars clamor to be inside us. Whatever we invent becomes the history we have to live. In truth, it takes only a handful of history's shadows to commandeer our dreams It takes a famine of the heart to empty the streets of our words. It takes an imaginary terror to rid ourselves of imagination.

stars that turn slowly off each dawn so that we begin to see how many things can go on living without us, — Richard Jackson, from "Triptych," Broken Horizons: Poems (Press 53, 2018)

For a moment you are asleep in my heart. What more can I ask for? I am rocking inside your breaths. I have turned into the words you whisper. When I speak to you, I clothe my heart with your heart. When you tighten and tremble into love, these dreams wander into distant fields and leave no tracks, I have never been so lost, I have never been so certain of where I am. from "The Story

My own heart seems / locked away, the combinations lost, tomorrow lost / among the endless echoes of words not yet spoken. — Richard Jackson, from "The Invisible Object," Retrievals (C & R Press,

I would like to find the words to make sure the man only looks longingly at the way night has begun to deepen itself in the river. It's easy to drown yourself in words that drift out of your past. — Richard Jackson, from "Easy," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

There is always another heart within the heart, for / what we own is never what we have, what we love / is never what we own — Richard Jackson, from "Francis' Prayer," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart's Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. — Richard Jackson, Superstition Review issue 2 fall 2008