Dawn is cold.

I opened the door. When my eyes had accepted the dimness I could see the water striders’ feet dimpling the surface of the pool and a green frog on a glistening ledge just above the water. I fastened the door and lay down outside at the place I liked best to drink, which was just below the threshold stone where the water was flowing and yet so smooth that it held a piece of the sky in it as still and bring as a set in a ring. The water was so clear you could look down through the reflection of the sky or your face and see maybe a crawdad. I took my hat off and drank big swallows, relishing the coldness of the water and the taste it carried up from the deep rock and the darkness inside the hill. As I drank, the light lay warm on my back like a hand, and I could smell the mint that grew along the stream. When I had drunk all I could hold I put my nose into the water, and then my whole face.

from Wendell Berry’s A World Lost

___

So I leaned into the fountain, dropped a penny in, and asked it just how many times would I confirm the notion that, if not for having tried to get to know someone, to really be known by someone, then I might have found a way to make my memory stand for something meaningful and truly unsurpassable before the termination of my life.

from Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple.  They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs L. has six corns on each toe.)  It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort.  It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.  But for the very reason that such conversations are unthinkable without absentmindedness, they reveal empty spaces which, if one insists, can be filled only by thinking, or, better yet, by dreams.

from Kafka’s diary, 3.24.1912

___

Well, we talk. Which is a wonderful thing. You are not very meta-physical, and I am not very human.  ‘This activity, originating in the midst of men, moves in a direction away from them.’

Moves therefore as you correctly sense towards death— For all my violence, you are a great deal stronger, a great deal more durable than I.

For which I am glad.

from a letter from George Oppen to June Oppen Degnan, 9.12 or 22.1963

Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

from Jane Hirschfield’s “Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight”

—-

Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.

Anne Carson’s “Short Talk on Bonheur D’Etre Bien Aimee”

—-

It seems like argumentation or puzzle solving.  Whereas the point is something else, the point is the mind operating in a marvel which contains the mind —— the point is the marvel, not this that one likes and that which one doesn’t like, but the marvel, the Loved, the Loved and Not Loved — . It can really not be thought about because it contains the thought, but it can be felt. It is what all art is about.

from an addendum to a letter from George Oppen to June Oppen Degnan, 9.12 or 22.1963

This is the place I told you about,
where I used to come at night to see the red-winged blackbirds,
what we call thrush here—
red flicker of the life that disappears—-

But for me—I think the guilt I feel must mean
I haven’t lived very well.

Someone like me doesn’t escape.  I think you sleep awhile,
then you descend into the terror of the next life
except

the soul is in some different form,
more or less conscious than it was before,
more or less covetous.

After many lives, maybe something changes.
I think in the end what you want
you’ll be able to see—

Then you don’t need anymore
to die and come back again.

from Louise Gluck’s “Thrush” (Averno, 2006)
_____

It was about this time
I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes.  She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away?  I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.

from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (Glass, Irony and God, 1995)
_____

Come to me, said the world.
That is not to say
it spoke in exact sentences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

from Louise Gluck’s “October” (Averno, 2006)

_____

something that maybe I    could bargain with
and make a separate peace   beneath
within   if never with

Elizabeth Bishop (via Carl Phillips’ The Tether, 2002)

——

And that is the story’s terribly tragic ending.  It matters very little what precisely he did.  Maybe he just pulled down the sky on himself.

— but there’s never been any account of events like this, and I am overwhelmed by it. Perhaps you felt differently: tell us how you feel.

from a letter from George Oppen in October 1964.

More and more fearful as I write.  It is understandable.  Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits - this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture - becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum.  The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or no.  And what you like is of infinitesimally little help.  More than consolation is: You too have weapons.

Kafka’s final journal entry (1923)

_____

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?
Our mind is split.

from Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus

_____

The action of eros does harm to the beloved when the lover takes a certain controlling attitude, an attitude whose most striking feature is its determination to freeze the beloved in time. It is not hard to see that a similar controlling attitude is available to the reader or writer, who sees in written texts the means to fix words permanently outside the stream of time.

from Anne Carson’s “Damage to the Living” (Eros the Bittersweet, 1986)

_____

Much had transpired in the phantom realm.
Are we whole now? Louise asked.
I think we are, the other said.

from Mary Jo Bang’s “Louise in Love” (Louise in Love, 2001)

_____

5.1. To suggest is to create; to name is to destroy.

5.2. I couldn’t find a minute to explain the enigmatic phrase in my letter and I don’t like to remain cryptic with friends like you, although I’m happy to be so when I want to force others to think of me.

Stephane Mallarme (1842 - 1898)

The lovers
have hands solely for loving
                                     they have only their hands
hands that are feet and wings over their bodies
hands that constantly seek
the breathing animal behind buried eyes
fingers that set their bodies on fire
that are branches on which caresses flower
flowers that are birds that are flames that are hands
hands that are lost in their lightning writing

hands that travel the flesh of bodies
like stars touching at daybreak
like suns rising        like shooting stars
like secret gods who draw the night

from Veronica Volkow’s The Beginning

_____

2.1.  Wings are an instrument of damage and a symbol of irresistible power.  When you fall in love, change sweeps through you on wings and you cannot but lose your grip on that cherished entity, your self.

2.2.  Wings mark the difference between a mortal and an immortal story of love.

2.3.  Both the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.

from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (1986)

_____

Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful
are always lied to since the weak are always
driven by panic. I cannot love
what I can’t conceive, and you disclose
virtually nothing: are you like the hawthorn tree,
always the same thing in the same place,
or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up
a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,
and the next year, purple in the rose garden? You must see
it is useless to us, this silence that promotes belief
you must be all things, the foxglove and the hawthorn tree,
the vulnerable rose and tough daisy—we are left to think
you couldn’t possibly exist.  Is this
what you mean us to think, does this explain
the silence of the morning,
the crickets not yet rubbing their wings, the cats
not fighting in the yard?

Louise Gluck’s “Matins” (The Wild Iris, 1995)