poetry – Page 4 – wraithsandstraysofparis

“We’ve Only Just Begun”

By Anne Carson

“The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely … swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one star falls upon the dreamer.”

— C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

You are killing me, but you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Works; “The Old Man and the Sea,”
(via violentwavesofemotion)

violentwavesofemotion:

Friederike Mayröcker, tr. by Beth Bjorklund, from Tod Durch Musen; “Ostia will Receive You,”

ephemeral-vesper:

“Don’t look too long at dead serpents. For dead serpents revive under the gaze of those who love them. The witching eyes of Lilith bring them back to life, just like moonlight animates stagnant waters. They love the moon, because she is as cruel as they are. They adore that insidious light.”

— Renée Vivien, tr. by Jeanette H. Foster, from “A Woman Appeared To Me,”
(via 89words)

maggie-stiefvater:

“Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream: You come too.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke (via quotemadness)

femmociraptor:

“Femme Fatale” by Susan Kane

[From The Femme Mystique, ed. Lesléa Newman]

rhiannonmcgavin:

anne carson has a grip on my ankle and is dragging me over the cobblestones to the center of town

catapultstory:

Not the Word, but the Thing Itself: Ava Kofman on Clarice Lispector.

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

Barbara Hurd, from Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Beacon Press, 2001)

Via A Poet Reflects

(via imhavingacrisis)