Quotes from Richard Jackson

Sometimes I think the soul is a shadow even gravity can't touch, and love is what passes in the mirror as we look away. from "Desperate Note from Byron's Palace in Lerici

Sometimes it seems that all our words, even those for love, are written in another language. And yet they still arrive, distant, full of their own silences which may be what allows us to invent another story, what saves us. What is the word for the kind of love the woman shows now? A word that contains the whole story the way her lamp contains her room, — Richard Jackson, from "The Whole Story," Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

And what does a single feather mean except the love we treasure, or a butterfly mean except the dreams we chase, the way those doves chased whatever called them from beyond the park, something beyond words, beyond the sky that gives away nothing except the longing to discover how love creates its own endless skies. — Richard Jackson, from "Poem for Amy," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

If you ask me do I love you, I have to tell you that I have never loved you, not even now, not tomorrow. In this way, I can begin to love you again and again because there is no past. This is the way the moon unbutton the stars as it passes overhead. The way even the most distant galaxies continue to tug on us. This is the way I love you. from "If You Ask Me

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

Is there any way we can purely touch the world again, the way a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into hoping to emerge into a world where—where what? There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret, no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

My own words cast a shadow a never meant. Please forget them. Or not. The shadows we speak sometimes are what tell us how astonishing the morning, is, as here, where a last owl tightens a grip on a branch, where a last chance circles with the first swallows.

I don't want to see you caught like a word in that last line. What does the nightingale do when it runs out of things to say? Only this: I have never been so astonished at the love of one woman which is the way the moon finally closes its eye behind a ridge, the way the wind never stays around long enough to see what it has brought.

One time, your heart almost slipped away on a river barge. Your hands seemed to claw the sky. I'm sorry. No one else made anything out of those streaked clouds. The fact that it happened is proof enough for me.

It's the cliff I climb when the moon is you.

If you ask me do I love you, I have to tell you that I have never loved you, not even now, not tomorrow. In this way, I can begin to love you again and again because there is no past. This is the way the moon unbutton the stars as it passes overhead. The way even the most distant galaxies continue to tug on us. This is the way I love you.

It doesn't take much to blindfold the heart. How easy it is to adjust our eyes to the darkness in our own souls.

Now the wind is lifting the eyelid of the lake. I remember my soul breaks open like a seed beneath the ground just to think of you.

That was when our love began for me, though late, the way a flock of darkness settles over your shoulders. I remember the muted reflections that smudged the water prowling among the lingering rocks, a snail crawling out of its shell, the drizzle of light, the blackened windows. It was when that the sun peeled away the dark from the air, the surface of the water, then the soul. —Richard Jackson, from "Place Message Here," The Cortland Review . Spring 2005.

There are times when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read what is written on the far sides of stars. — Richard Jackson, from "Alternate Endings," Resonance (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

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. from "Involuntary Beginnings

This is why I have written you in here, hoping to find a way to change the meanings of these words, to say war but mean peace, death but mean life, hate but mean your love, nothing but everything you could possibly mean to be. from "Misunderstood

How seldom we can see our way to say what we love. — Richard Jackson, from "Elegy Along a Line of Sight," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

And this morning, / above us, invisible stars the daylight hides begin to map for us, / secretly, new paths our hearts had seemed to despair of,–those /vapor trails that linger longer than they are supposed to, the wake / of the boat that echoes perhaps endlessly, shore to shore,– if only / we can believe in them without ever seeing where they are. — Richard Jackson, from "Invisible Star Maps," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

Maybe we have to betray ourselves in order just to be ourselves. In the end, Truth taps at the window of our souls. What quivers on the lake are only the footprints of Fate. Even our astronomers hear the funeral sounds of dying galaxies before they ever see them. Gusts of time are filling my lungs.

When do you realize the selves you left behind have gone on without you, living the many lives you now begin to resemble?

I have only these words that seem as if they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well.