December 2011
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Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle...
– Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Burning the Old Year”
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Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and smoky,...
– T. S. Eliot, from “Portrait of a Lady” (via TSElibot)
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We are involved with flower, leaf, and fruit.
They speak not just the language...
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, from “XIV,” trans. Stephen Mitchell
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Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my...
– Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (via awritersruminations)
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Evil is a growing thing
It has its own gravity
and never answers to its name...
– Fanny Howe, from “One Night in Balthazar”
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You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your...
– Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (via whiskey river)
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Naming the things of this world
you begin to own them.
Cyclamen. Mustard.
I...
– Shirley Kaufman, from “Drifting”
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And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have...
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
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Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of...
– Cesare Pavese (via whyhellodear)
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I wonder if you knew how I watched,
how I crowded before the spearsmen—
but...
– H. D., from “Loss“
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What is the water in a lake? A blank page. The ripples are its wrinkles. And...
– Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions II, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
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There is nothing concrete to grasp in
looking into the morning sky
The...
– Ed Roberson, “Here”
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The night is dark, the waters deep,
Yet soft the billows roll;
Alas!...
– Helen Maria Williams, from “A Song”
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We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be...
– Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, sc. ii. (via bellswithin)
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Love is distinct from desire… Because its aim is not satisfaction, but...
– Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, trans. John Forrester
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The astonishing flowers, seething
a blue I could barely see.
– Mark Doty, from “Days of 1981” in Fire to Fire
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If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly I could see to write you a...
– Amy Lowell, “A Lover”
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It’s dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood...
– James L. White, from “Lying in Sadness” in The Salt Ecstasies
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There is always somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are...
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
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I miss your wingspan miss your hollow bones.
– Dora Malech, from “Flight, Fight Or”
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One day after another—
Perfect.
They all fit.
– Robert Creeley, “One Day”
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I want to know what more I’ve gained by losing.
– Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Ronald W. Sousa
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Hands
these things that dust in words.
– Hoa Nguyen (via figmentspot)
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crossroad at night—
virgin snow reflects
the flashing amber light
– Rafał Zabratyński (via yama-bato)
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Try finding a sunset through a simple gift of looking west. There can be too...
– Richard O. Moore, from “d e l e t e, Part 6”
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The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through...
– John Milton, from “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature...
– Søren Kierkegaard (via bardsandsages)
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The Savior must have been
A docile Gentleman—
To come so far so cold a Day...
– Emily Dickinson, “[The Savior must have been…]”
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I am present.
– Paul Goldman, from “For This Morning” (via the-final-sentence)
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Perhaps not the meaning of time,
but the time of meaning, & the fact that...
– Seth Abramson, from “What I Have”
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So a river can exist inside the sea.
And the sea will have no reverie
inside...
– Elizabeth Willis, from “Cursive”
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This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my rolling ellipsis or valedictory spray...
– Aaron Shurin, from “Plume” in Citizen
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The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed
with that thunder. It was...
– Luke Davies, from “[In the yellow time of pollen]” (via the-final-sentence)
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And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot
towards death, every...
– Luke Davies, from “[And if every step taken is a step well-lived]”
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Your body that includes everything
you have done, you have had done
to you and...
– Margaret Atwood, from “Circe/Mud Poems” in Selected Poems, 1965-1975
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