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I would like to step out of my heart/ and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

Rilke, from “Lament”

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Hart Crane, born on this day in 1899. Read his work at Poets.org.

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We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive.

Anne Carson, from “Short Talk on Orchids”

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What groaning, what lament, what song of death, what dance of Hades shall I do?

From Herakles, by Euripides, trans. Anne Carson

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True singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

Rilke, from “The Sonnets to Orpheus,” I, 3, trans Stephen Mitchell.

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I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.

Anne Carson, from the Introduction to Short Talks

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“Short Talk on Defloration,” by Anne Carson

The actions of life are not so many. To go in, to go, to go in secret, to cross the Bridge of Sighs. And when you dishonoured me I saw that dishonour is an action. It happened in Venice, it causes the vocal chords to swell. I went booming through Venice, under and over the bridges, but you were gone. Later that day I telephoned your brother. What’s wrong with your voice? he said.

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From “To My Twenties,” by Kenneth Koch

Twenties, my soul Is yours for the asking You know that, if you ever come back.

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Many men / Have searched all over Tuscany and never found / What I found there, the heart of the light / Itself

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Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.

Sylvia Plath, from “Lady Lazarus”

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Wild to be wreckage forever.

James Dickey, from “Cherrylog Road”

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The self persists like a dying star.

Theodore Roethke, from “Meditation at Oyster River”

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O sweet frustrations, I shall be back for more.

Richard Wilbur, from “A Voice from Under the Table”

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You can try to answer, but you need / words for that, and you don't have any.

Phil Levine, from “Sicilian Voices”

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Eat and love, to be sure, but you better eat first.

Jim Harrison, from “Mid Range Road Kill”

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It's quite a mystery, albeit largely unacknowledged, to be alive, and, quite simply, in order to remain alive you must keep eating. My notion, scarcely original, is that if you eat badly you are very probably living badly.

Jim Harrison, from “Hunger, Real and Unreal”

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Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities.