Do you?

Back at my desk in the dark morning, drinking black coffee and yes, this poem and G.C. Waldrep reminding me the why of it all.
poems.com/poem/a-meado...

—Rilke

“A Memory” — Philander Johnson

I’d rather be memory, touching the undersides of all I ever touched once in the natural world.

—Charles Wright, closing line to “Bicoastal Journal,” from Xionia (Windover Press, 1990)

The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

She molds to me
gentler than any cloud
has ever drifted
across a starlit sky,
and I am a prayer,
a ghost, a vapor,
nebulous as the night.

— Ed Stever, from “Her Back to Me,” Passionate Hearts, ed. Wendy Maltz (New World Library, 1996)

On the sill
the blown-out candle
burning
in the past.

— Franz Wright, from “Duration,” Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

I wish I could build a fire /
In you that would never go out.

— Kenneth Rexroth, from “Runaway,” The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, eds. Sam Hamill & Bradford Morrow (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

1883

"You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you."

—David Whyte