 “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar  Had we nothing to prove
we might have leaned all night at that window, merely beside each other, watching Peel Street, wrought-iron gates and weather vanes, black lace of trees between cautious Victorian silhouettes; but there were obligations, the formalities of passion; so we sealed the shutters and were expedient in the brevity of night; reading with empty sockets moonlight in dull hair, softness to chafed thighs; both of us anxious and shaking the night, with all my arm, she with fingers and gentle; no hope for silver leaves in the morning. And always a glance for the brightening windows, a suspension of breath for the hearing of birds and incantations to the sun which stirs in dust behind stone horizons. - Leonard Cohen  When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by with exquisite music, voices, don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city, go firmly to the window and listen with deep emotion, but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward; listen—your final delectation—to the voices, to the exquisite music of that strange procession, and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. - CP Cavafy  We don’t know how to say goodbye.
We wander all over, shoulder to shoulder. It is already starting to get dark, You’re thoughtful, and I remain quiet. Let’s go inside a church, and watch A baptism, a wedding, a funeral. Why can’t we live like that? Let’s leave, not looking at each other. Or, let us sit in the cemetery, Quiet in the trampled snow. And watch you trace with a stick, Places where we will always be together. - Anna Akhmatova 
 You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean. You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely If I’m lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns’ first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep If I’m lonely it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning - Adrienne Rich  even if you are a small forest surviving off of
moon alone. your light is extraordinary. - reminder Nayyirah Waheed  I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing… Silence… Waves… —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life? Juan Ramón Jiménez Translated by Robert Bly  “Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” - Edward Hopper
9
I broke your heart. Now barefoot I tread on shards. 17 Why is the word yes so brief? It should be the longest, the hardest, so that you could not decide in an instant to say it, so that upon reflection you could stop in the middle of saying it. 18 —Sing me The Song of Songs. —Don’t know the words. —Then sing the notes. —Don’t know the notes. —Then simply hum. —Forgot the tune. —Then press my ear to your ear and sing what you hear. Vera Pavlova  Danger. Suspect. Fallen. What three words Between lost And found And you? J 
And with knees like that
You won't live long “Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost  Time and again
You, too, Must long for Your old nest Deep in the mountain. - Taigu Ryokan The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert in great sheets, reams of silver handmade by you. The night is your cottage industry now, the day is your brisk emporium. The world is full of paper. Write to me. - Agha Shahid Ali  Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell
"Leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes; your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses. You make him call before he visits. You take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street." Frida Kahlo  “I keep thinking you already know. I keep thinking I’ve sent you letters that were only ever written in my mind.”
― Iain Thomas “Yet you still value the things you’ve lost the most. Because the things you’ve lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grow rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the things you no longer have will always be perfect.”
― Iain Thomas |
