Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside youAre not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,Must ask permission to know it and be known.The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,I have made this place around you.If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.No two… Continue reading David Wagoner
To need is always the supreme moment. Just as the most daring happiness between a man and a woman comes when needing becomes so great that it is felt in agony and wonder: without you I will be unable to live. Love’s revelation is a revelation of lacking—blessed be the poor of spirit for the… Continue reading Clarice Lispector
Sometimes it is like remembering smells— it is a feeling, not a story you can tell, not a time or a place, not the people you were with but the sense that something deep inside you is reaching out like metal to a magnet. — Alex Chernow, from “museum of Broken lovers,” Boulevard (vol. 30,… Continue reading Alex Chernow
If I had no clothes it’d be winter. If I were naked, it’d be the truth and we could lie together. ― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not For Sale (May 18, 2011)
Dusk felland the cold came creeping,cam prickling into our hearts.As we tucked beaksinto feathers and settled for sleep,our wings knew. That night, we dreamed the journey:ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,the sun’s pale wafer,the crisp drink of clouds.We dreamed ourselves so far aloftthat the earth curved beneath usand nothing sang buta whistling vee of… Continue reading Joyce Sidman
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city. ― Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Andesite Press, August 8, 2015)
Sleep If sleep is truce, as it is sometimes said,a pure time for the mind to rest and heal,why, when they suddenly wake you, do you feelthat they have stolen everything you had? Why is it so sad to be awake at dawn?It strips us of a gift so strange, so deep,it can be remembered… Continue reading Jorge Luis BorgesJorg
It just seems that the whole time you’re living this life, you’re thinking about a different one instead. — Inga Ābele, High Tide (Open Letter Books, 2013)
and a world stilled for a secondas if it had stopped breathing as if in the space between breathsthe brain might float like a planet on nothing and the eye open to a flensing, pared downto a pulse and the long less than an instant a word takes to thread one soul to the next… Continue reading Fred Marchant
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it. — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. (A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie. 1862)
The Vale of Soul-Making 