the light is not something you see, exactly. You don't look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don't look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette. And you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet) although the fact that he is there, silent and absent beside a thin wisp of cigarette smoke, hammers you. You rest your chin on your hand, like a saint on a pillar. Moments elongate and drop. A radiance is hitting your skin from somewhere, every nerve begins to burn outward through the surface, your lungs float in a substance like rage, sweet as rage, no! - don't look.
Anne Carson, Kinds of Water
I am the fire, says the fire. My body is a graveyard,
says the landscape. You’re welcome, says the landscape.
- Richard Siken, Landscape with Several Small Fires
Never finish a war without starting another.
Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field
When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.
Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede
To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.
Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather, Not Under Forty