The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him / That He taste also the humiliation of dread, / cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go, / like any mortal hero out of his depth, / like anyone who has taken herself back. (Denise #Levertov, “Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Like a child / at a barbaric fairgrounds — / noise, lights, the violent odors — / Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides! (Denise #Levertov, “On a Theme by Thomas Merton”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

God lives / on the other side of that mirror, / but through the slit where the barrier doesn't / quite touch ground, manages still / to squeeze in – as filtered light, / splinters of fire, a strain of music heard / then lost, then heard again. (Denise #Levertov, “Contraband”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

My absent fruit / stood for their barren hearts. (Denise #Levertov, “What the Figtree Said”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Perhaps it has for you / some message (Denise #Levertov, “Embracing the Multipede”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Three hours wholly absorbed: trying to identify one rainsoaked / wormridden mushroom And the ducks—bufflehead or goldeneye? (Denise #Levertov, “Namings”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

even through eyes not naked but robed / in optic devices (Denise #Levertov, “After ‘Mindwalk’”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

The woods which give me their silence, / their ancient Douglas firs and red cedars, their ferns, / are not the wilderness. They’re contained / in the two-mile circumference of an almost-island, / a park in city limits.(Denise #Levertov, “The Almost-Island”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

But coots without warning effortlessly / dive (Denise #Levertov, “Contrasting Gestures”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

the lake is wearing a narrow, trembling /band of silver, /a silver barely tinged with gold, / delicate tarnish. (Denise #Levertov, “Indian Summer”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying / toward me, settled / just offshore on his post, / took up his vigil. (Denise #Levertov, “A Reward”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Sometimes the mountain / is hidden from me in veils / of clouds, sometimes / I am hidden from the mountain / in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue (Denise #Levertov, “Witness”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Today the white mist that is weather / is mixed with the sallow tint / of the mist that is smog. (Denise #Levertov, “Whisper”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Luminous mountain, / real, unreal sky. (Denise #Levertov, “Looking Through”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

When my friend drove up the mountain / it changed itself into a big / lump of land with lots of snow on it / and slopes of arid scree. (Denise #Levertov, “Against Intrusion”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Ethereal mountain, / snowwhite foam hovering / far above blue, cloudy ridges — / can one believe you are not a mirage? (Denise #Levertov, “Mirage”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

One day the solitary heron, / so tall, so immobile on his usual post, / seemed to have shrunk and grown darker. (Denise #Levertov, “Myopic Birdwatcher”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Like a balloon, / the moon stirred at a breath (Denise #Levertov, “One December Night …”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

Each year / the tower grows taller, spiralling / out of its monstrous root-circumference, ramps and colonnades / mounting tier by lessening tier the way a searching / bird of prey wheels and mounts the sky, driven / by hungers unsated by blood and bones. (Denise #Levertov, “In the Land of Shinar”) #EveningTrain #Poetry

No promise was being accorded, the blossoms / were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed / the war had ended, it had not ended. (Denise #Levertov, “In California During the Gulf War”) #EveningTrain #Poetry