C.M. Rivers

"I only borrowed this dust." ~ Stanley Kunitz

Journal

  • From Rilke’s Book of Hours

    I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood. Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that’s wide and timeless. So I am sometimes like a… Read more

  • Here’s Lookin’ At You, Kid

    How striking, how strange, that I was to speak with you for the last time, in the middle of my own birthday party. I thought you were calling to wish me a happy birthday. How childish and small I felt, once I realized – as if I had been struck by lightning or a god-like… Read more

  • Cooking Poetry

    There is poetry in cooking, and there is cooking in writing poetry.  Both require science, art, observation.  Both require an approach that is – to some extent – a combination of military thinking and creative thinking.  A sense of when to obey the laws, bend the laws, break them, rewrite them, be served by them.… Read more

  • I Want

    I want to ponder the radius of the earth as if it was yet to be discovered.  I want to burst through doorways with a clear voice singing, intoxicated with life.  I want fistfuls of cloud spilling out of my pockets. A poet is hungry, a poet is very thirsty. A poet dies every day,… Read more

  • Towards The Fire

    When things unravel with such fury, we conclude that something should be held responsible. We look for a place to lay our blame, though the source of our pain often has the power to be a catalyst for growth, a facilitator of movement in stagnant waters. If we can un-stick ourselves from the quicksand of… Read more

  • Reception

    Friends, I toss myself aside for you.  I become available for you.  I eat, drink, mumble, run hands through hair for you, scramble down the gulch for you, carry wood, fold socks, scrub pots, ever-fearless, requiring nothing. These are not the days of time’s inhalation pulling way up under the world’s collarbones, stitching together the… Read more