L’union libre [Freedom of Love] My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last… Continue reading André Breton
There was only one huge word with no back to it A word like a sun One day it broke into tiny pieces They were the words of the language we now speak Pieces that will never come together Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shattered — Octavio Paz, “Fable,” Selected Poems (New Directions… Continue reading Octavio Paz
Words are uncertain and speak uncertain things. But speaking this or that, they speak us. Love is an equivocal word, like all words. — Octavio Paz, from “Letter of Testimony,” A Tree Within (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988)
I want to be inside your darkest everything. — Frida Kahlo
I ask for a brief flash, the sudden glint of a reflection on the wave of that moment : memory and forgetting, in the end, the same instantaneous clarity. — Octavio Paz, “Prayer,” A Tree Within (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988)
The Death of Apollinaire (La Mort de Guillaume Apollinaire) We know nothing We know nothing of grief The bitter season of cold Ploughs long furrows in our muscles He would have rather enjoyed delight in victory We wise beneath calm sorrows caged Unable to do a thing If the snow… Continue reading Tristan Tzara
We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant. — Nikolai Gogol
