The balled

Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small

Mill of silence

- Sylvia Plath

To be both author of

this statue, and the statue itself.

- Frank Bidart

You wear your body as if without

illusions. 

- Frank Bidart

The Poem Is a Veil

Frank Bidart

V  E  I  L,—as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly

high at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see

catches, clinging to its physiognomy.

Reality is not, reality must be sought and won.

- Paul Celan

Homo Faber

Frank Bidart

Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within

me as I die dies with me.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

- Hegel

The way to approach freedom

was to acknowledge necessity

- Frank Bidart

P.S. Bidart recasts Hegel's philosophical proposition as an ethics of acknowledgment, shifting the emphasis from conceptual recognition to existential acceptance.

with an interest, and regard, and affection

- frank bidart

semioteca

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;  

not in silence, but restraint.

- Marianne Moore

To a snail

Marianne Moore

If “compression is the first grace of style,”  

you have it. Contractility is a virtue  

as modesty is a virtue.  

It is not the acquisition of any one thing  

that is able to adorn,  

or the incidental quality that occurs  

as a concomitant of something well said,  

that we value in style,  

but the principle that is hid:  

in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;  

“a knowledge of principles,”  

in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

(...) sooner or later

you will have to name me, and,

as you name, I shall focus,

I shall become more precise.

- Thom Gunn

Havien dit que el desig pot trucar

a la porta del no-desig,

i que, si està tancada, s'hi va ficant pam a pam.

- Tònia Passola

Ripples of fluid sorrow

- Argyris Stavropoulos

Farther

Ursula K. Le Guin

Adrift adrift

on the sound of rain

on a windless sea

in a sailless skiff