“I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, / somehow –the central heart that deals not / in words, traffics not with dreams, and is / untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, from II of “Two English Poems,” (1934)

“the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from ‘Envoi’, Dancing in Odessa

“Chorus: Your sob has a name.”

— Anne Carson, excerpt of “Pinplay”, in Float  (via antigonies)

“So what can we really do for each other except—just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope—for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are? Don’t you think so?”

— James Baldwin, from Another Country (Dial Press, 1962)

“You laugh like everything / is not burning.”

— William Evans, from “Lore,” We Inherit What the Fires Left

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “The Poet of Ignorance”

“We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.”

— The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (via one-small-garden)

having a lot of thoughts about this week’s ask polly

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

[Text ID: “To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.”

If language is a virus then let me be sick with words.

R. C. Weslowski, from “If Language is a Virus,” Arc Poetry Magazine (no. 78, Fall 2015)

“Beloved,       I miss you so dreadfully. Not in a desperate or melancholy way, because I know we shall soon be with each other again, but I feel at such a loss and just can’t get it into my head that you’re not around any more. This morning, half awake, I put a hand out to feel for you, then remembered you weren’t there, so I got up very quickly to escape the emptiness. And worked all day.” 

— Excerpt from a letter from Tove Jansson to Tuulikki Pietilä, published in Letters From Tove, trans. by Sarah Death; Sort of Books, 2019  

People in love are in fact condemned to go on learning the other’s language indefinitely, groping around, seeking out the keys – keys that are always revocable. Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings whose way out doesn’t exist.

Jacques-Alain Miller, interviewed by Hanna Waar on love (x)

“Memories are small prayers to God,”

— Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

ocean vuong, ‘daily bread’

[ID: “I build a life & tear it apart & the sun keeps shining.” end ID]

“In the dream I don’t tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.”

— Richard Siken, from I Had a Dream About You

    sometimes so much joy     it strips me bare lilacs grow beside             the city asphalt             and             my mouth can’t open                 wide enough to sing the possibility still left in me.

— Gwen Benaway, from day/break