I subsidenudged by the softeningdriftwood of your body,tangle on you like a water-weed caughton a submerged tree limb with sleep like a swampgrowing, closing around me — Margaret Atwood, from “Pre-Amphibian,” The Circle Game (Contact Press, 1966)
I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that. — Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (The Franklin Library; First Thus edition, January 1, 1980)
I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing… Continue reading Walt Whitman
Lay your heart against my heart that I may hear your love summoning me to forgetfulness…. Lay your mouth on my mouth until all dissolves in mist about me…. – Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, from “The Book of Love,” Poetica Erotica: A Collection Of Rare And Curious Amatory Verse. Edited by Thomas Robert Smith ( Kessinger… Continue reading Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff
I don’t want to see you caught like a word in that last line.What does the nightingale do when it runs out of things to say?Only this: I have never been so astonished at the love of one womanwhich is the way the moon finally closes its eye behind a ridge,the way the wind never… Continue reading Richard Jackson
I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall. — Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair (University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition October 1, 1996) Originally published 1933.
Every story is us. That’s who we are,from beginning to no-matter-how it ends. —Rumi, from “The Polisher,” Rumi: the Book of Love Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, transl. by Coleman Barks (HarperOne, 2003)
We only imagine it endslike childhood, or rain:fever, the purl in the bone, the amendedlustre of the self, all shell and glitter, as if I had long been decidedthat flesh is a journey,something immense in the blood,like a summer of locusts, or something not quite visible, but quickas birchseed, or the threading of a wirethrough… Continue reading John Burnside
my love is a mad sunflower that forgetsfragments of sun in the silence” — Isabel Fraire, “My Love Reveals Objects,” Isabel Fraire: Poems (Mundus Artium Press, 1975)
Moisture falls from the sky, cleansing the world and sustaining precious life. But it’s the gloom—the cold, dark air—that receives notice. We fail to see the miracle of raindrops through our own tears. ― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, June 23,… Continue reading Richelle E. Goodrich
The Vale of Soul-Making 