I

My hands lie between widened
faults in the rock
     a monument forming around me
     a shadow I am woven into
     the same way sounds move into each other

I know I am dreaming
when a waterfall appears
and I fall with it
hitting the river below
     a stone sinking
     into mud

II

The next day
I watch your face like I would
an unknown point in the distance

  cheeks curve inward
  eyes drive up into the brain
  lungs fill with fluid-- 
a conduit for the river I hear growing inside of you

but the mouth, it opens

an invitation

III

And what erupts from it
is an oak tree,
thin

"The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege."

- Marilynne Robinson

"Art can model the more difficult dynamic of transfiguring one’s life, but at some point the dynamic reverses itself: life models, or forces, the existential crisis by which art—great art—is fully experienced. There is a fluidity between art and life, then, in the same way that there is, in the best lives, a fluidity between mind and matter, self and soul, life and death. Experience seems to stream clearly through some lives, rather than getting slowed and clogged up in the drift-waste of ego, or stagnating in little inlets of despair, envy, rage. It has to do with seizing and releasing as a single gesture. It has to do with standing in relation to life and death like those late Bontecou mobiles, owning an emptiness that, because you have claimed it, has become a source of light, wearing your wound that, like a ramshackle house on some high exposed hill, sings with the hard wind that is steadily destroying it."

- Christian Wiman

“Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.”

- Sylvia Plath

"As I was returning from wherever I'd spent the evening--and I do remember that it was after dark--I stopped onto the sidewalk outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then, something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss."

- J.D. Salinger, "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period."