Theodore Roethke
Trust all joy. — Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, ed. David Wagoner (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
Month: February 2019
Charles Simic
All my dark thoughts laid out in a straight line. An abstract street on which an equally abstract intelligence forever advances, doubting the sound of its own footsteps. — Charles Simic, “Euclid Avenue,” Unending Blues: Poems (Mariner Books, 1986)
Edmond Jabès
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to… Continue reading Edmond Jabès
Pablo Neruda
XXVII Naked, you are simple as a hand, smooth, earthy, small…transparent, round. You have moon lines and apple paths; Naked, you are slender as the wheat. Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color, Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair; Naked, you are spacious and yellow As a summer’s wholeness in a… Continue reading Pablo Neruda
Fernando Pessoa
Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out… Continue reading Fernando Pessoa
Charles Wright
After the end of something, there comes another end, This one behind you, and far away. Only a lifetime can get you to it, and then just barely. — Charles Wright, from “28,” Littlefoot: A Poem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)
Tom Stoppard
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to… Continue reading Tom Stoppard
William Shakespeare
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit. — William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Act II. Scene vi.
Paulo Coelho
She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors–white, black, yellow–with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone’s, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before,… Continue reading Paulo Coelho
Frank O’Hara
It is almost three I sit at the marble top sorting poems, miserable the little lamp glows feebly I don’t glow at all I have another cognac and stare at two little paintings of Jean-Paul’s, so great I must do so much or did they just happen the breeze is cool barely a sound filters… Continue reading Frank O’Hara
The Vale of Soul-Making 