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With all we have collected, through sentiment & image alike, the grand gesture of time takes its spin without our knowing, without our signal, but with some direct and definite wisdom of course. For the path unfolds as it will, wild and with potent purpose that we can not deny even as it splits landscape  between us and charges our hearts with the difficulty of distance. -Jacqueline Suskin

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You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore. But darkness holds it all: the shape and the flame, the animal and myself, how it holds them, all powers, all sight — and it is possible: its great strength is breaking into my body. I have faith in the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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—Rae Armantrout. “Write Home.” Up to Speed.  Wesleyan University Press, 2001. p. 47

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Cada (tic-tac) es un segundo de la vida que pasa, huye, y no se repite. Y hay en ella tanta intensidad, tanto interés, que el problema es sólo saberla vivir. Que cada uno lo resuelva como pueda. Every tick-tock is a second of life that passes by, that flees never to repeat itself. And it holds such intensity, such interest that the only problem is knowing how to live. May each person solve it as best they can.

Frida Kahlo

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Saint Francis and the Sow  by Galway Kinnell

The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;   as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch   blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow   began remembering all down her thick length,   from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,   from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine   down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering   from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

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“I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.” -Vladimir Nabokov

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Poetry - Poem, Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names, my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating plantations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe. And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind.

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From The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche

Star Friendship. - We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did - and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.

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from The Shield of Achilles W. H. Auden

   She looked over his shoulder        For vines and olive trees,     Marble well-governed cities       And ships upon untamed seas,     But there on the shining metal       His hands had put instead     An artificial wilderness       And a sky like lead.

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I felt a cleavage in my mind   As if my brain had split; I tried to match it, seam by seam,   But could not make them fit.   The thought behind I strove to join   Unto the thought before, But sequence ravelled out of reach   Like balls upon a floor. -Emily Dickinson

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All of Us arrived in the post, bookmarked to page 194:

Company Raymond Carver

This morning I woke up to rain on the glass. And understood that for a long time now I’ve chosen to corrupt when I had a choice. Or else, simply, the merely easy. Over the virtuous. Or the difficult. This way of thinking happens when I’ve been alone for days. Like now. Hours spent in my own dumb company. Hours and hours much like a little room. With just a strip of carpet to walk on.

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The Garden by Ezra Pound

En robe de parade. Samain LIKE a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal                of a sort of emotional anemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I                will commit that indiscretion.