Leviathan Truth also is the pursuit of it: Like happiness, and it will not stand. Even the verse begins to eat away In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit; A wind moves a little, Moving in a circle, very cold. How shall we say? In ordinary discourse— We must talk now. I am no longer sure of… Continue reading George Oppen
When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;… Continue reading Walt Whitman
Perhaps — I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears. — Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind. (Grand Central Publishing; Reprint edition April 1, 1999) Originally published 1936.
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light,… Continue reading T.S. Eliot
So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so… Continue reading Rebecca Seiferle
The name of a person you love is more than language… — Tennessee Williams, from “The Vine,” Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. (New Directions; Reprint edition, April 17, 1994) Originally published 1985.
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire. I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow Upon that God who knows what I would know. —Theodore Roethke, from “The Marrow,” The Far Field. (Bantam Dell Pub Group; 1st US – 1st Printing edition, September 1, 1998) Originally… Continue reading Theodore Roethke
