What Are The Best Academic Essays You’ve Ever Read?

Love like the horse chestnut loves carbon,

like the sun isn’t millions of miles away

or doomed. Love like a blue fir amongst white pines,

like a wide shovel opening the earth. Rewind

your favorite moments over early dinners:

the correct identification of an olive tree, climbing

65 feet up a fat trunk, turning backpack pockets

into houses for leaves. Love as eagerly as sprouting seeds,

as hungry as a goat up an argan tree. Love like you are

spotting a red squirrel for the first time. Relish in your blooming

knowledge of Latin, wood chopping, propagation. Love as easy as

hibiscus roots drink rain. Breathe in the smell

of earth-drenched boots. Savor the quick-flowing photos of pheasants and hedgehogs and newts.

Live like a pioneer species. Love like sempervirents: evergreen.

Love like every green thing ever planted

will live long and never burn

- Christina Thatcher, How to Love a Gardener

Remains of colour on temple columns.

Death wanted to be this beautiful but we buried it

Garous Abdolmalekian, Sea tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

You're the muscle / I cut from the bone and still the bone / remembers, still it wants (so much it wants)

Ada Limón, In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me

Beside the river are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

the light is not something you see, exactly. You don't look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don't look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette. And you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet) although the fact that he is there, silent and absent beside a thin wisp of cigarette smoke, hammers you. You rest your chin on your hand, like a saint on a pillar. Moments elongate and drop. A radiance is hitting your skin from somewhere, every nerve begins to burn outward through the surface, your lungs float in a substance like rage, sweet as rage, no! - don't look.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

thinking about Kait Rokowski writing, "nothing ever ends poetically, it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red." and losing it

FOR RENT: / an empty sky

- Agata Tuszyńska, Classified Ads tr. Regina Grol

and the moon is the mouth of a lover

Garous Abdolmalekian, Acquiescence tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

“I am the ocean; the earth; whatever dies for you.”

— Alice Notley, from In The Pines: Poems; “The Black Trailor (A Noir Fiction),” (via loveage-moondream)