Paula Modersohn-Becker - “Self-Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary” (1906)

This painting, then, is not simply a nude self-portrait but a declaration of liberation. Not only from the ties and duties of marriage, but also from the constraints and expectations of Paula's time and class. As she wrote in a letter to Rilke before leaving for Paris: "I am myself..." For she has painted herself as blooming and quietly exhalant, set against a dappled surround of spring leaf-green. Here she is her own woman, on the brink of fulfilling her true potential, at one with herself. When she arrived in Paris, she wrote: "Now I have left Otto Modersohn, I stand between my old life and my new one. What will happen in my new life? And how shall I develop in my new life? Everything must happen now."

In fact, Paula was not pregnant in this painting. Only the previous month she had written that she did not want to have a child yet, particularly with Otto. The painting, then, is a metaphor for how she felt about herself as a young artist: fecund, ripe, able for the first time in her life to create and paint freely in the manner that she wished. What she is about to give birth to is not a child but her mature, independent, artistic self. Traditionally, nude portraits of women had been painted for the delectation of the male gaze, but here Paula creates a new construct: a woman who is able to nurture herself outside the trappings of marriage, who does not need a man to be fulfilled.

-- Sue Hubbard

I watch the sun quietly setting alone with my shadow and my pain.

-- Antonio Machado, from “Country Roads” (translated by Robert Bly)

Water is good, so is thirst; shadow is good, so is sun; the honey from the rosemarys and the honey of the bare fields.

-- Antonio Machado, from “Moral Proverbs and Folk Songs” (translated by Robert Bly)

Hope says: Someday you will see her, if you know how to wait. Despair says: She is only your bitterness now. Beat, heart...The earth has not swallowed everything.

-- Antonio Machado, “Hope Says” (translated by Robert Bly)

Lord, you have ripped away from me what I loved most. One more time, O God, hear me cry out inside. “Your will be done,” it was done, and mine not. My heart and the sea are together, Lord, and alone.

-- Antonio Machado, “Lord, You Have Ripped Away” (translated by Robert Bly)

Jenny Holzer

Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvellous error!— that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me, water of a new life that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvellous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvellous error!— that a fiery sun was giving light inside my heart. It was fiery because I felt warmth as from a hearth, and sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept, I dreamt—marvellous error!— that it was God I had here inside my heart.

-- Antonio Machado (translated by Robert Bly)

It is a July night scented with gardenias. The moon and stars shine hiding the essence of the night. As darkness fell —with its deepening onyx shadows and the golden brilliance of the stars— my mother put the garden, her house, the kitchen, in order. Now, as she sleeps, I walk in her garden immersed in the solitude of the moment. I have forgotten the names of many trees and flowers and there used to be more pines where orange trees flower now. Tonight I think of all the skies I have pondered and once loved. Tonight the shadows around the house are kind. The sky is a camera obscura projecting blurred images. In my mother’s house the twinkling stars pierce me with nostalgia, and each thread in the net that surrounds this world is a wound that will not heal.

-- Jaime Manrique, “The Sky Over My Mother’s House” (translated by Edith Grossman)

The setting of houses, cafes, the neighborhood That I’ve seen and walked through years on end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, With so many incidents, so many details.

And for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

-- C.P. Cavafy, “In the Same Space”

Andrew Wyeth - Christina Olson, (1947)

The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind.

The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.

-- Louise Glück, from “Prism”

There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you’ve been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world. You’re in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again. At night, on a cold hill, taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false.

You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.

-- Louise Glück, “Telescope”

I am tired of having hands she said I want wings—

But what will you do without your hands to be human?

I am tired of human she said I want to live on the sun—

-- Louise Glück, from “Blue Rotunda”

Kiki Smith - Untitled (Butterfly) (1994)

He said that he'd stumbled into a wall or fallen. But likely the cut on his shoulder was caused by something more serious.

He stood up abruptly, reaching for some photographs on a high shelf that he wanted to hold. The bandage loosened and the cut opened.

I dressed his shoulder again, but was slow in finishing, because it caused him no pain and because I liked to look at his blood. That blood was the source of my longing for him.

When he left, I found at the foot of his chair a bloodied cloth, cotton, a cloth that looked ready for the rubbish bin and that I took to my lips and held there for a long time — the blood of longing on my lips.

-- C.P. Cavafy, “The Bandage”

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt, bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal— I can finally say long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty the healer, the teacher—

death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.

-- Louise Glück, from “October”

If I die before you which is all but certain then in the moment before you will see me become someone dead in a transformation as quick as a shooting star’s I will cross over into you and ask you to carry not only your own memories but mine too until you too lie down and erase us both together into oblivion.

-- Galway Kinnell, “Promissory Note” in Strong Is Your Hold