And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers,… Continue reading John Ashbery
The extremes are easy. Only the middle is a puzzle. Midsummer — everything is possible. Meaning: never again will life end. — Louise Glück, from “Heaven And Earth,” Poems 1962-2012. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 5, 2013)
At the end of the unfinished letter, I stared at words no one could have fathered, until they grew still and took on the depth of woods, the patience of ponds blackening under the flat shadows, — Larry Levis, from “The Witness,” The Afterlife (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998)
I speak of new cities and new people. I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west. I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of to-morrows, a sky of to-morrows. — Carl Sandburg, from… Continue reading Carl Sandburg
The world is a nest of absences. Every once in a while someone comes along to fill the gaps. — Richard Jackson, from “Misunderstood,” Out of Place: Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)
Life must go on; I forget just why. — Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Lament,” Early Poems. (Penguin Classics; Reprint edition, December 1, 1998)
The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end. — Jack Gilbert, “Waking at Night,” The Dance Most of All: Poems. (Knopf; 1 edition, July 6, 2010)
