Richard Jackson > Quotes

“Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.”
― Richard Jackson, Retrievals

“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.”
― Richard Jackson, Retrievals

“After All This"

After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors
through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty
bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of
disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns
to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing
inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point
still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm.
The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you.
After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells
a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence
of last night’s constellations? or the storm anchored by
its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember
the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern
lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots
spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear
again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can
hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words
ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light?
The words that walk through my mind say only what has
already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting
the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire.
After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain.
Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of
a burned out house. He is too young to remember the war.
He hardly knows the emptiness that kindles around him.
He can speak the language of early birds outside our window.
Someday he will know this kind of love that changes
the color of the sky, and frees the earth from its moorings.
Sometimes I kiss your eyes to see beyond what I can imagine.
Sometimes I think I can speak the language of unborn stars.
I think the whole earth breathes with you. After all this,
these words are all I have to say what is impossible to think,
what shy dreams hide in the rafters of my heart, because
these words are only a form of touch, only tell you I have no life
that isn’t yours, and no death you couldn’t turn into a life.”
― Richard Jackson, Resonance

“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.”
― Richard Jackson, Out of Place

“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.”
― Richard Jackson

“Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches
of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars
we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend
once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones
we collect, a story he would say begins with you, with me,
a story that is forever lost among the backwaters of our lives,
our endless fear of ourselves, and our endless need for hope,
a story, perhaps an answer, a word suddenly on wing, the simple
sound of a torn heart, or the unmistakable scent of the morning's fading moon.”
― Richard Jackson

“My love, whose fingers are matches, whose waist is
encircled by the arms of the wind. My love, how the world
sleeps in your throat, how your heart is filled
with the scents of raspberries and grapes,
to live inside you, to live inside the warm peach.
Otherwise there is no way to stop despair from lurking
all night in the shadows beside the old toll gate.
Otherwise we will have to weep in another language.
It was on a country road. It was in the wrong tense.
How do we stop all our words from falling in love with gravity?
Otherwise we will have to stop taking breaths
from this moment on. From this moment on
the abandoned clocks will observe us. My love,
our hearts are growing full of broken wings,
My love, to find our voice in a drop of water,
in the tracks the starlight leaves behind.
If only this were enough. If only we could get
the attention of Time, standing in that doorway,
peeling an apple. It hurts here. It hurts here.

— Richard Jackson, from “The Italian Phrase Book,” Richard Jackson Greatest Hits: 1980-2004 (Pudding House Publications, 2004)”
― Richard Jackson, Richard Jackson Greatest Hits: 1980-2004

“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)”
― Richard Jackson, Out of Place

“Can you imagine a silence so desperate
to be heard?”
― Richard Jackson

“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.”
― Richard Jackson

“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...”
― Richard Jackson

“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.”
― Richard Jackson

“Light staggers through the trees.
Every moment is filled with other moments.”
― Richard Jackson, Out of Place

“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.”
― Richard Jackson

“Sorrow walked in my clothes before I did. Flocks
of shadows followed me. One night I looked at the stars
I thought were gods until they disappeared. Some say
I smashed my father’s idols and walked away.
Or walked towards a desert of barren promises.
Or promises that are hummingbirds hovering for
a moment then drifting away. Even now, walking
towards that mountain, sometimes I will watch
my shadow sitting beneath a plane tree, casting dice,
ignoring my steps. Some of you made me a founder
but it was only that shadow. Some of you made me
your father, but it was yourselves you were describing.
You plant a tree, you dig a well, and it brings life,
that’s all. Everything else is the heart’s mirage.
Except what begins inside you. Except Sarah.
When she stepped inside my dream the curtains
shivered, whole mountains entered the room.
It always seemed a question of which love to honor.
The land I loved fills with fire. Who should we listen to?
It’s true, He offered the world and I offered only
myself. But I thought His words were coffins. I was
frantic for any scrap of shade. Now everything is
shade. Your old newspapers are taken up by the wind
like pairs of broken wings. Each window, each door is
a wound. One track erases another track. One bomb.
One rock, one rubber bullet. What can I tell you?
Where have you left your own morning of promises?
You remember Isaac, maybe Ishmael, but not the love
that led me there. Not Sarah. Just to hear the sound
of her eyelids opening, or her plants pushing the air
aside as they reach for the sun, twilight filling
her fingers like fruit. This afternoon a flock of doves
settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape
of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle
you want aches inside the trees. Why believe
anything except what is unbelievable? I never
thought of it as a trial, not any of it. Now the leaves
turn into messages that are simply impossible to read.
The roots turn into roads as they break through
the surface. How can I even know what I mean?
Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep
on the grass. We have to turn into each other.
One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word.
Inside us, our shadows will walk into water,
the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful.
Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds.
Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe
the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes
the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.”
― Richard Jackson

“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)”
― Richard Jackson, The Heart as Framed: New & Select Poems

“[B]ecause now
in this moment which is so wondrous the way
it lies beside you, I either do not exist or the past
has never existed, either my breath is
the breath of stars or I do not breathe as I turn to you,
as you breathe my name, my heart,
as the net of stars dissolves above us, as you wrap
yourself around me like honeysuckle, the moon
turning pale because it is so drained by our love,
so that before this moment, before you lay beneath me,
you must have disguised yourself the way the killdeer
you pointed out diverts intruders to save what it loves.
pretending a broken wing, giving itself over finally
to whatever forces, whatever love, whatever touch,
whatever suffering it needs just to say I am here,
I am always here, stroking the wings of your soul.

—Richard Jackson, closing lines to “Sonata of Love’s History,” Heartwall<?i> (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)”
― Richard Jackson, Heartwall

“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)”
― Richard Jackson, Heartwall

“When do you realize the selves you left behind
have gone on without you, living the many
lives you now begin to resemble?”
― Richard Jackson, Retrievals

“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”
― Richard Jackson

“So much of what we dream flickers out before we can
name it. Even the sun has been frozen on the next street.
Every word only reveals a past that never seems real.
Sometimes we just stare at the ground as if it were
a grave we could rent for a while. Sometimes we don’t
understand how all that grief fits beside us on the stoop.
There should be some sort of metaphor that lifts us away.
We should see the sky open up or the stars descend.
There are birds migrating, but we don’t hear them, cars
on their way to futures made of a throw of the dice.
The pigeons here bring no messages. A few flies
stitch the air. Sometimes a poem knows no way out
unless truth becomes just a homeless character in it.”
― Richard Jackson, Retrievals

“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)”
― Richard Jackson, The Heart as Framed: New & Select Poems

“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.”
― Richard Jackson, Out of Place

“This afternoon a flock of doves
settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape
of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle
we want aches inside the trees. Why believe
anything except what is unbelievable?
[…] Now the leaves
turn into messages that are simply impossible to read.
The roots turn into roads as they break through
the surface. How can I even know what I mean?
Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep
on the grass. We have to turn into each other.
One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word.
Inside us, our shadows will walk into water,
the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful.
Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds.
Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe
the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes
the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.”
― Richard Jackson, Out of Place

“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.”
― Richard Jackson, Resonance

“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.”
― Richard Jackson

“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)”
― Richard Jackson, Broken Horizons

“It is not hard to imagine how quickly
we’ll be forgotten. What endures is the idea we can
endure. We hang these stories on a few fragile
branches of memory.
                                           This is where you are
supposed to be addressed with allusions to
the particulars.
                                 We are alive because each of us
owns a word we keep trying to pronounce.
I must go in, the fog is rising, Dickinson said
before being “called home.” You’d think the rain
might mend a bruised heart.  We can’t even complete
the sentences of our lives.

—Richard Jackson, from “Endurance,” Out of Place: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)

 

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― Richard Jackson, Out of Place

“It’s the cliff I climb when the moon is you.”
― Richard Jackson, Resonance

“I want to make her think the constellations have all wandered
into new formations, that the lake’s moon is held a prisoner
each time she refuses to listen to these words, that the flowers
turn from her when she turns from me–a poetry not to be
squandered
as in the past, not lost among the cries of the stars, unheard,
but carrying home, as the sparrow, in order to restore
its nest, carries one twig at a time, some new metaphor
that startles her soul into knowing what I have endured,
and into knowing what a prisoner she’s been in her own heart,
and she will see this poem as some lost rose in the snow, fallen
inside her, or a relic some farmer unearths as he plows,
and then she’ll know how her refusals only seem to chart
new lands and stars in this poem that finally transcends
all fears of me, and some new, some sacred love allow.

— Richard Jackson, “The Poetics of Love,” Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (Autumn House Press, 2004)”
― Richard Jackson, Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems