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And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Hair
Dream
Pared
Ends
Clipped
Like
Toenails
Frivolity
Split
Splits
Dreams

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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
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our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
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But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
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Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them let a boat be kept there.
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I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
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An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
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I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
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You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
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blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.
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Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
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Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
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