Alive Together
Lisel Mueller
Top 10 Best Quotes
“How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious”
“Tears The first woman who ever wept was appalled at what stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Saltwater. Seawater. How was it possible? Hadn't she and the man spent many days moving upland to where the grass flourished, where the stream quenched their thirst with sweet water? How could she have carried these sea drops as if they were precious seeds; where could she have stowed them? She looked at the watchful gazelles and the heavy-lidded frogs; she looked at glass-eyed birds and nervous, black-eyed mice. None of them wept, not even the fish that dripped in her hands when she caught them. Not even the man. Only she carried the sea inside her body.”
“This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent;”
“I search the language for a word to tell you how red is red.”
“When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.”
“There are Mornings" Even now, when the plot calls for me to turn to stone, the sun intervenes. Some mornings in summer, I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die. But the plot calls for me to live, be ordinary, say nothing to anyone. Inside the house, the mirrors burn when I pass.”
“Necessities1 A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas, but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in. With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up. The green smear of the woods we first made love in. The yellow city we thought was our future. The red highways not traveled, the green ones with their missed exits, the black side roads which took us where we had not meant to go. The high peaks, recorded by relatives, though we prefer certain unmarked elevations, the private alps no one knows we have climbed. The careful boundaries we draw and erase. And always, around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back.”
“My husband says spring will be early. He says this every year, And every year I disagree. He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation. Together we make the equinox.”
“Now in the thriving season of love when the bud relents into flower, your love turned absence has turned once more, and if my comforts fall soft as rain on her flutters, it is because love grows by what it remembers of love”
“How I would paint happiness Something hidden, a windfall, A meteor shower. No- A flowering tree releasing all its blossoms at once, and the one standing beneath it unexpectedly robed in bloom…”
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Book Keywords:
motherhood, joy, map, comfort, atlases, beauty, ocean, tears, letter-to-california, sea, parent, balance, salt-water, woman, guide, marriage, nurture, mother, soulmate, nature, wonder, happiness, wisdom, enoughness, life, poetry, maps, mystery, sorrow, when-i-am-asked, world, grief, love, opposites, travel, partnership
