My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

- Wisława Szymborska

I let myself be invented

- Wisława Szymborska

I TEACH silence

in all languages

- Wisława Szymborska

I exist not in myself,

I’m an element’s function.

A symbol in the air.

Or a circle on the water.

- Wisława Szymborska

O perilous, altruistic mute god of love.

- Bianca Stone

I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forget

it’s language I long for. Man and his ciphers

cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up

with more meaning.

- Bianca Stone

Maybe humans are the failed AI of Nature.

Maybe Nature made something it thought would tend the garden.

Maybe Nature made something sexy, to watch

clean the pools with long butterfly nets

and a sunburn—the retainers of Nature.

- Bianca Stone

how can someone not become

heartbreaking in one sense

of the word—not find

they are a stranger in their own household

of truly

     unnamable need?

- Bianca Stone

We must risk delight.

- Jack Gilbert

Time does not go beyond its maiden name.

And anyway, right now, everything tastes good.

All the male poets’ poems, and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake.

I swallow it with a glass of milk.

The crumb crawls down my throat

and enters me. The power of Christ compels,

     not I—but the wish to be changed—

everything is challenged

by the sudden flame of joy—

how uncomfortable we are with happiness.

- Bianca Stone

Knowledge invades him, yet he shrinks again

   And sickens to live still

Upon the green slopes of his isolation

- Thom Gunn

I search for meaning, studying to remember

What the world was, and meant

- Thom Gunn

The lover burns without knowing what is burning.

- Roland Barthes

Instruct me how to find here my desire:

To separate the matter from its burning

- Thom Gunn