Marie Ponsot > Quotes

“I stand above the tree level I am a tree I catch wind storm breaths My branches claw I drink sky It stretches me I don't care I catch jokes and luck from tall thin blue air”
― Marie Ponsot

“Poetry is priceless.... a way of keeping yourself feeling rich and civilized even when you're quite poor. ”
― Marie Ponsot

“One is One

Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world--though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
& thrill its corridors with messages.

Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.
You scare me, bragging you're a double agent

since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too.
Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,
and joy may come, and make its test of us.

”
― Marie Ponsot

“Burn, or speak your mind. For the oak to untruss its passion it must explode as fire or leaves.”
― Marie Ponsot, Easy

“Old Mama Saturday"

“Saturday’s child must work for a living.”
“I’m moving from Grief  Street.
Taxes are high here
though the mortgage’s cheap.

The house is well built.
With stuff to protect, that
mattered to me,
the security.

These things that I mind,
you know, aren’t mine.
I mind minding them.
They weigh on my mind.

I don’t mind them well.
I haven’t got the knack
of  kindly minding.
I say Take them back
but you never do.

When I throw them out
it may frighten you
and maybe me too.

Maybe
it will empty me
too emptily

and keep me here
asleep, at sea
under the guilt quilt,
under the you tree.”
― Marie Ponsot

“Only to themselves are the passionate hot. To the objects of their passion they are cold. What Yeats knew. They eradicate what they notice, as the thumb hard-crams the clay impressionable under it, to lie flat, apt to the shape their cold-steel scribes may cut or spurn it to. Yet they know passion must drown to ripen sweet & give fair play to the whole life hot passion speeds us from.”
― Marie Ponsot, Easy

“As the music stops you’ll miss its lilt. Keep dancing, keep listening. Speak up. Ask for more music, more. In case you don’t know, what you want is magnificent, yours for the asking, the rhythm of magnanimous exchange.”
― Marie Ponsot, Easy

“As passion’s object, dig with your ampersand: be cold & hot. The receptive earth will come to transform the root-end that your planting hand cut & abandoned, to new chrysanthemum. Heartfelt thought, drop your guard, keep clear, be slow; double your careful opposites & grow.”
― Marie Ponsot, Easy

“Sight likes travel which likes fresh surprises. Self likes surprise that undoes old disguises.”
― Marie Ponsot, Easy

“LAST Waste-pipe sweat, unchecked, has stained the floor under the kitchen sink. For twenty years it’s eased my carelessness into a mean soft place, its dirty secret dark, in a common place. Today the pipe’s fixed. Workmen rip up the floor that’s served and nagged me all these good/bad years. They cut and set in new boards, to last for years. House-kept no more, I waltz out of the place clean-shod and leave no footprint on the floor, displaced and unfloored. This year, nothing goes to waste.”
― Marie Ponsot, Easy