Quotes from Alice Oswald

so the thought goes on recycling itself

And so he goes on dwindling away maybe through too much prayer is now too rarefied to touch or settle anywhere

the village is lost in its veils a few dreams lean over the lanes like nettles

being dragged along crippled over things as if broken-winged

not yet continuous no more than a shiver of something

I am cold cold trying to slide myself out of my own shade but hour by hour more shade leaks out

it's as if I've interrupted something that was falling in a straight line from the eye of God

somebody out not back being out again

Why is this jostling procession of waters, its many strands overclambering one another, so many word-marks, momentary traces in wind-script of the world's voices, why is it so bragging and surrendering, love-making, spending, working and wandering

somebody lost out late again

living in the slippery maybe the last green places are you listening

Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrined in sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants, prisoners on dream-bail, children without parents, free-trading, changing, disembodied, blind dreamers of every kind; even corpses, creeping disconsolate with tiny mouths, not knowing, still in tears, still in their own small separate atmospheres, rubbing the mould from their wet hands and feet and lovers in mid-flight all sank like a feather falls, not quite in full possession of their weight.

and bodiless black lace woods in which one to another a songbird asks is it light is it light not quite

wet and sweet like stewed apples this must be the heart this is only a dream

not many of us left not much movement in the blackening lanes among a few low trees little flocks of orchids in the ditches nobody cares

when a man rolls over and sighs

remembering better times whereas naming no names some of us would rather not remember something some of us have got enough bloody nightmares already

very nearly anonymous now having recently turned five thousand with the same wedge of yearning lodged in my chest as ever and getting accustomed to surviving like a bramble very good at growing anywhere you ought to praise me for this trailing bloom

cold nights without streetlights walking to the sea perhaps

examining the whole horizonless question of desire

so many names in this place not many of us left living on the last we can find can you hear this

I thought I heard myself being looked for what is it I said what is it madam that you wish to imply

she never quite completes her sentence but is always almost

no turning back each drop is a snap decision a suicide from the tower-block of heaven