Come Back. Tell Us What You’ve Seen. Tell Us You Met A God So Reckless, So Lonely, It Will Love Us

To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors

Above my own life on a crippled wing I soar, oh, I soar

Julia Hartwig, On the Heights tr. Regina Grol

I was suddenly some safer form of fire.

Ada Limón, What Remains Grows Ravenous

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

the precise sound of a flower bud

- Ross Gay, Weeping

He lives in a small country of hope which is his heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.

Mark Rothko, The Romantics Were Prompted... 

‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated by Anne Carson)

How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Ada Limón, “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”

the equable but confused light of a summer’s morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando