We dream of  lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,

a word is worth a thousand pictures.

What you say doesn’t have to be true.

It only has to be imaginable. 

- David Kirby

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

- Wallace Stevens

I think language is more than capable

of looking out for itself, don’t you? I mean, when was 

the last time you looked at the list of synonyms for

baffled? They’re among the best in the English language: 

puzzled, nonplused, discombobulated, flummoxed, stumped, 

fogged, bewildered, buffaloed.

- David Kirby

Like a door

the body opened and

the soul looked out.

Timidly at first, then

less timidly

until it was safe.

Then in hunger it ventured.

Then in brazen hunger,

then at the invitation

of any desire.

- Louise Glück

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