x "A doctor once told me I feel too much
I said so does God
That’s why you can see the Grand Canyon from the moon
We are a telescope a riverbed
We are empty lockets melting into gold
We are hearts breaking bread
Fold me in the napkin poem
Pull the tinsel from my hair from all the past I cannot let go
My gills are adjusting to the air
The story husk peeled from my bones
My bones know the song of our tears
dripping from the faucet
ticking like a metronome
I know there is better music"
— Andrea Gibson, from “Jellyfish”

Summer

Summer, brilliant at the door
wide, sweet shawl, green cicada
bird calls, wild by the feeder
and showers glisten on the rocks

and Woolf, hillocks, hammock, sea
and rapture
and nothing breaks
just the sun’s spine on yours

just laughter with long teeth.

— Santiago

x "74

We lay down, and the pain let up.
We embraced, and the pain let go:
No more scalding regrets,
no scorching remorse
that oppressed the soul,
that weighed like a stone on the heart.
You, on top of me, heavy, immense,
and I, feeling so light."
— “[We lay down and the pain let up]” by Vera Pavlova, in If There is Something to Desire, trans. Steven Seymour

x "Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom."
— James Wright, from “A Blessing”

Szczebrzeszyn

She tells a Polish tonguetwister
Her voice a soft wind
Slipping through tall grass

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie

In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reeds.

— Daniel Stephensen

Love Song

How should I keep my soul
from touching yours? How shall I
lift it up beyond you to other things?
Ah, I would gladly hide it
in darkness with something lost
in some silent foreign place
that doesn’t tremble when your deeps stir.
Yet whatever touches you and me
blends us together the way a bow’s stroke
draws one voice from two strings.
Across what instrument are we stretched taut?
And what player holds us in his hand?
O sweet song.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, in New Poems, trans. Edward Snow

x "It’s easy to rip an unsewn stitch
Or tear the thread of an untold tale—
The song of us two together."
— Unknown author, from “Wulf and Eadwacer”, in The Exeter Book, trans. Craig Williamson
(Source: the-final-sentence)

x "Have I been here before
And is this—the reprinting
Of moments forgotten forever?"
— Anna Akhmatova, from an untitled poem, in The Complete Poems, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer

x "Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough."
— Louise Bogan, in The Blue Estuaries: Poems (1923-1968), with thanks to journalofanobody