Browse Topics

Selected Poems

Old Soul

How Aging Reveals Character — A Conversation With James Hillman

To show one’s face is part of having the courage to show who one is. And coming to terms with your own face takes a lifetime. Just think how, when you were twelve or sixteen, you wished you looked different. And that’s true for everyone; even the most perfect, beautiful boy or girl is dissatisfied. So why is that? It can’t just be that I don’t look like the model on the magazine cover. It’s something else. You haven’t yet accepted your fate, who you are. As you get older, that relationship between your face and who you are matures. They blend together. Your true self shows more.

The Force Of The Face

Baby Face/Death Mask. Right away, at birth, the infant no sooner delivered, breathing, and bathed, its face is studied for clues to character. It looks so fierce, so wisely old, so placid, so much like “your” side of the family. . . . And, at the end, quiescent and struggle-free on the deathbed, they used to come with the plaster to make a death mask. The custom, begun almost five thousand years ago in Egypt, would capture the essence of character in the features of the face.

Midnight

The thin wall between this world and the next, midnight letters, warm milk and molasses

February 2000

My lament is the same lament. My wife is sympathetic, but she’s heard it all before. Even the beautiful English language shakes her head when she sees me coming. Him again, she thinks, with his fifty synonyms for sadness.

Sunbeams

Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.

Alexis de Tocqueville

On The Flying Trapeze

Sam Keen Ponders How To Be Free

I think trapeze could provide an excellent liturgy for a new society. Our present public liturgies, like football and basketball, are a kind of ritualized violence. One side has to beat the other. In trapeze, men and women cooperate to create something of transcendent beauty. A great trapeze act is a kind of performance art. Like a Navajo sand painting, it shows you something of exquisite beauty that lasts only for an instant and then is gone.

Falling Into Life

Over the past five years, as I have moved into the solidity of middle age, I have become aware of a surprising need for symmetry. I am possessed by a peculiar passion: I want to believe that my life will balance out. And because I once had to learn to fall in order to keep this life mine, I now seem to have convinced myself that I must also learn to fall into death.

Beach Boy

I am a moody, bookish teenager living in a small town on the coast. Ten miles offshore, the Isles of Shoals seem to hover, whispering of mystery, a promise unfulfilled, a gift forever withheld. In fact, the islands are easily reached by boat in an hour, and the one time I went there it was bleak and cold and a seagull swooped down with its sharp yellow beak and stole my sandwich. I prefer to regard them from the shore, imagining a paradise just beyond my reach.

We Domesticated Plants And Animals

And we’re still staggering like oxen laden / with too many wine barrels: what to do with all this time? // We were little more than plants or animals ourselves, / scratching in the dirt like chickens. Find, eat, find, eat.