Straight lines go too quickly to appreciate the pleasures of the journey. They rush straight to their target and then die in the very moment of their triumph without having thought, loved, suffered or enjoyed themselves…It is another story with curved lines. The song of the curved line is called happiness. — René Crevel Advertisements
kiss me a little: the air darkens and is alive – o live with me in the fewness of these colours; — E. E. Cummings, from “XLVIII,” ViVa. (Liveright; 2nd ed. Edition, October 17, 1997) Originally published 1931.
So many constellations that are held out to us. I was, when I looked at you — when? — outside by the other worlds. O these ways, galactic. O this hour, that weighed nights over for us into the burden of our names. It is, I know, not true that we lived, there moved, blindly,… Continue reading Paul Celan
ix nearer: breath of my breath: take not thy tingling limbs from me: make my pain their crazy meal letting thy tigers of smooth sweetness steal slowly in dumb blossoms of new mingling: deeper: blood of my blood: with upwardcringing swiftness plunge these leopards of white dream in the glad flesh of my fear: more… Continue reading E. E. Cummings
Go blind at once, today: eternity too is full of eyes— what helped the images overcome their coming drowns there; there the fire goes out of what spirited you away from language with a gesture you let happen like the waltz of two words made of pure fall, silk, and nothing. — Paul Celan, from… Continue reading Paul Celan
The endless corridors of memory, the doors that open into an empty room where all the summers have come to rot — Octavio Paz, from “Sunstone,” World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, ed. Katharine Washburn, John S. Major and Clifton Fadiman (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000)
gee i like to think of dead it means nearer because deeper firmer since darker than little round water at one end of the well it’s too cool to be crooked and it’s too firm to be hard but it’s sharp and thick and it loves, every old thing falls in rosebugs and jackknives and… Continue reading E. E. Cummings
