David St. John > Quotes

“Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one's imagination about that place -- what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.”
― David St. John

“It may be that places exist in order that memory itself has a home.”
― David St. John

“Having your evening coffee over
A field guide of trails or alpine blossoms

& so I need now to ask you
Which of the old journals did you first

Open to a map of my long wandering
When did you first know I'd come back

& how did you find yourself here
& how did you know this single lantern

You are reading by was the last possible
Light to lead me home?”
― David St. John, The Auroras: New Poems – Masterful Poetry of Intimacy, Music, and Sensual Beauty

“When I came to see you
It hurt me how thin you had become

In the months of addiction & disease
& although your particular abyss

Was a man & not a drug
The degradation was the same

The same wasting of the flesh
The same tapped-out well emptied

Of the least leaf of emotion
The same frozen rage”
― David St. John, The Auroras: New Poems – Masterful Poetry of Intimacy, Music, and Sensual Beauty

“She was walking in the cherry orchard
& the moon washed the stiff folds
Of her gown with the misery of the century

& ah those blisters of consciousness bursting
All around her in the air like
Descartes’ shooting stars piercing the blackening sky

As above her those dangling constellations of
Tiny cerise planets trembled
With the held expectations of the evening just past

from “Cerise”
― David St. John, Prism