Letter from Town: The Almond Tree You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget?White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge?Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledgeOf our early love that hardly has opened yet. Here there’s an almond tree—you have never seenSuch a one in the north—it… Continue reading D.H. Lawrence
This is a kiss. It is what happens when lips are puckered and pressed against something, sometimes other lips, sometimes a cheek, sometimes something else. It depends…This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my… Continue reading Jonathan Safran Foer
I am hungry for your silken laughter,For your hands the color of savage harvest,Hungry for the pail stones of your fingernails.I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. — Pablo Neruda, from “Love Sonnet XI,” The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. (City Lights Publishers; Bilingual edition April 1, 2004)
While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the… Continue reading Jeanette Winterson
You don’t know nights of love? Nopetals of soft words float on your blood?No secret places on your bodythrob with memories, like eyes? — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Paris, Winter 1913-14.,” Uncollected Poems, translation by Edward Snow. (North Point Press; 1st North Point Pbk. Ed., Bilingual Ed edition April 11, 1997)
When the cathedral bells struck seven, there was a single, limpid start in the rose-colored sky, a ship called out a disconsolate farewell, and in my throat I felt the Gordian knot of all the loves that might have been and weren’t. — Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Publisher Editorial Norma (Colombia)… Continue reading Gabriel García Márquez
You had carved the infallible signsOf my enchantmentWith a dagger whose coral handle forks into infinitySo that your blood and mineWould become one — André Breton, from “It Was Going on Five in the Morning,” Andre Breton: Selections. (University of California Press; 1st edition October 1, 2003)
Let’s start with this statistic: You are delicious. Be brave, my sweet. I know you can get lonely. I know you can crave companionship and sex and love so badly that it physically hurts. But I truly believe that the only way you can find out that there’s something better out there is to first… Continue reading Greg Behrendt
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.It is like a prayer to what is empty.And what is empty turns its face to usand whispers:‘I am not empty, I am open.’ — Tomas Tranströmer, from “Vermeer,” The Winged Energy of Delight. Translation by Robert Bly. (Harper Perennial May 10, 2005)
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again. — Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (Stanford University Press; 1 edition January 1, 2000)
The Vale of Soul-Making 