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

Crave nothing, accept the morning’s washed and proffered air

brushing blued eyelids with an oblique desire.

- Marilyn Hacker

I tell myself:

“Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”

- Frank Bidart