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

Self-islanded by thought and dream

the solitary soul

forgets the deepest depth, the earth

that joins us all

- Ursula K. Le Guin

In the vast abyss before time

- Ursula K. Le Guin

My eyes can see a star,

but not my mind.

The more I think, the more

I am unfamiliar.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

But even a silent interlocutor adds

something to a narrative, which turns

in spirals, auricular labyrinths, to add

conjunction and conjecture.

- Marilyn Hacker

History

cycles over in place, unless we learn

something from the cycle

—learn to unlearn

what’s overdetermined.

- Marilyn Hacker

Parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi.

- Montaigne

This morning

at five fear seized me and clung

like a leech, a tick, napalm:

what could calm its ravening?

- Marilyn Hacker

Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!

Aux yeux du souvenir, que le monde est petit.

- Charles Baudelaire

What you regret you redress

if you can; use; don’t forget.

- Marilyn Hacker