When I am dead, even then, I will still love you, I will wait in these poems, When I am dead, even then I am still listening to you. I will still be making poems for you out of silence; silence will be falling into that silence, it is building music. — Muriel Rukeyser, “Then,”… Continue reading Muriel Rukeyser
I’ve typed myself into a fine nostalgia. — Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, 14 December 1957, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008)
Stranded with you at the Ferris wheel’s apogee I learned the physics of desire—fixed at the center, it spins and goes nowhere. — Nick Lantz, from “Ancient Theories,” We Don't Know We Don't Know. (Graywolf Press, 2010)
When I was 5 years old my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. The told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.… Continue reading John Lennon
And how do you propose we un-knot all these tangles? Not, I trust, on the rocks below: brave souls pick a hotel from the travel guide and go. What do fools do? Don’t know. Probably the same but badly. Bombardiers stay home. Bombardiers know too much of bombs to roam. — Jennifer Michael Hecht. from… Continue reading Jennifer Michael Hecht
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going. ― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, (Harper Perennial; Reprint edition September 20, 2011)
Fourth Meditation 1 I was always one for being alone, Seeking in my own way, eternal purpose; At the edge of the field waiting for the pure moment; Standing, silent, on sandy beaches or walking along green embankments; Knowing the sinuousness of small waters: As a chip or shell, floating lazily with a slow current…… Continue reading Theodore Roethke
How sweet the silent backward tracings! — Walt Whitman, from “Memories,” First Annex: Sands at Seventy, Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition (BOMC, 1992)
strange isn’t it how every day brings us to a place we’ve never been, strange isn’t it, my nearly perfect one, how passionate we once were, almost, I would say, like bread and cheese which cannot bear to part and thus go down the dark throat together. And now it seems we have nothing other… Continue reading William Kistler
…is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. ― Jonathan Safran Foer,… Continue reading Jonathan Safran Foer
The Vale of Soul-Making 