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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
Frivolity
Split
Splits
Dreams
Hair
Dream
Pared
Ends
Clipped
Like
Toenails

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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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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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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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The artist must create himself or be born again.
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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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The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
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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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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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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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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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What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
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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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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into 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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Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.
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The threat of world's end is the old threat.
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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
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Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air.
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