Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays And Poetry

“and you were gazing at me, more than gazing — my gaze was dreaming you, and yours was dreaming me.”

— Pedro Salinas, from “Tell me”; To Live In Pronouns: Selected Love Poems (tr. by Edith Helman & Norma Farber)

“I was afraid of love, of being taken away. Everyone afraid of love is afraid of death.”

— Louise Glück, “Timor Mortis” from Vita Nova

When Donna Tartt said Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not, and M. L. Rio said How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.

2.3 Brain Drain, Russian Doll (2022) // Gustav Klimt, Mother and Child (detail from The Three Ages of Woman, 1905)

Nick Alm     Undressed Blonde   2012

“There is a solitude in seeing you, Followed by your company when you are gone. You are like heaven’s veins of lightning. I cannot see til afterward How beautiful you are. There is a blindness in seeing you, Followed by the sight of you when you are gone.”

— Witter Bynner, “Lightning,” The Beloved Stranger: Two Books of Song and the Divertisement for the Unknown Lover (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919)

“There’s a soft spot in everything Our fingers touch, the one place where everything breaks When we press it just right. The past is like that with its arduous edges and blind sides, The whorls of our fingerprints embedded along its walls Like fossils the sea has left behind.”

— Charles Wright, from “Two Stories,” The Other Side of the River (Random House, 1984)

Georgy Chulkov, from “Autumnal Love,” featured in “A Treasury of Russian Verse,”

Christian Cowan SS RTW 22’