Donika Kelly > Quotes

“Refuse the old means of measurement.
Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen.
-From "Out West”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“I have never known a field as wild
as your heart.
-From "Love Poem: Centaur”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“You bear a sword and shield, remind me
of her labor, her stoning gaze. What beast

will your blade free next? What call will you loose
from another woman's throat?”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“You grow. You are large.
You are a 19th century poem.
All of America is inside you,
a catalogue of lives and land
and burrowing things.
-From "Catalogue”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“You'd rather be a simpler animal.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“What the tongue wants.
Supplication and the burn
of crystals expanding.

To be, always, a waxing,
a waning, and, in waxing
again, not ever the same.

Waste and deferral.
Accumulation and deferral.
You are flesh,

and you are water,
though of the flesh,
you are only muscle,

and of the water,
you are saltless and clean.
Be a caution, a reckoning,

be a thing that breaks
before it bends.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“I call this the difficulty of the nonbeliever, of waking, every morning, without a god. How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer.”
― Donika Kelly, The Renunciations: Poems

“The first thing a dying star does is swell—swallows whatever is near.”
― Donika Kelly, The Renunciations: Poems

“I am not land or timber
nor are you
ocean or celestial body,

but rather we are
the small animals
we have always been.”
― Donika Kelly

“Who. Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned.”
― Donika Kelly, The Renunciations: Poems

“The man feels his chest. Am I a ghost?
His lungs reply: You are the bravest stone.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“Tumbling from what holds me to the world. / O, to do away with the meat and light of me.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“This road is a winding one.
We left the west flooded
with new loneliness.”
― Donika Kelly

“I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house.

Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.”
― Donika Kelly

“When did one season begin and another end? What branched like a nerve?”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“Love, how do I gain / what was lost in winter?”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“What is the metaphor
for two animals
sharing the same space?

Marriage?

We share a practice,
you and I,
a series of postures.”
― Donika Kelly