“Who then devised the torment? Love.”
– T.S.Eliot, from “Little Gidding” in The Four Quartets
Category: Love
Everything I know, I know because of love – (Tolstoy)
A Moment
The clouds had made a crimson crown
Above the mountains high.
The stormy sun was going down
In a stormy sky.
Why did you let your eyes so rest on me,
And hold your breath between?
In all the ages this can never be
As if it had not been.
– Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Won’t Go
Where?
It Is At Moments I Have Dreamed
it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed
with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds
the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always) and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;
moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:
one pierced moment whiter than the rest
– turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.
– E.E. Cummings
Bury Reality
It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.
– Don DeLillo
What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
– Linda Pastan
memoryhouse 