A MOOD OF QUIET BEAUTY - john ashbery

The evening light was like honey in the trees
When you left me and walked to the end of the street
Where the sunset abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not flower.
You climbed aboard.

Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones,
Dreams I had, including suicide,
Puff out the hot-air balloon now.
It is bursting, it is about to burst
With something invisible
Just during the days.
We hear, and sometimes learn,
Pressing so close

And fetch the blood down, and things like that.
Museums then became generous, they live in our breath.

WISHED LOST (excerpt) - sarah ruth jacobs

and sobbing they play again
like records scratched through the skin.

SECOND FIG - edna st. vincent millay

safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

FIRST FIG - edna st. vincent millay

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--

It gives a lovely light!

HOW I LOVE YOUR EYES - fyodor tyuchev

how I love your eyes, my friend,
with their radiant play of fire,
when you lift them fleetingly
and like lightning in the skies
your gaze sweeps swiftly round.

but there is charm more powerful still
in eyes downward cast
for the moment of a passionate kiss,
when through lowered eyelids glows
the sombre, dull flame of desire.

IRRATIONALITY - frederick neitzsche

The irrationalty of a thing is no argument against its existence rather a condition of it.

THOUSAND STARS - frederick nietzsche

You need chaos in your heart to give birth to a thousand stars.

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAIN - sara teasdale

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

KNOWLEDGE - andrei tarkovsky

knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life.

MY LIFE - henri michaux

You're going someplace without me, my life.
You're rolling away.
And I'm still waiting to make my move.
You've taken the battle somewhere
Abandoning me on the way.
I never followed, I stay.
Where you are leading me, I can't plainly see.
The very little that I want, you never bring to me.
Because of this emptiness, I want
So many things, almost everything...
Because of this emptiness, that you never fill.

BUT THERE HAS TO BE MORE - arseny tarkovsky

Now summer is gone
And might never have been.
In the sunshine it's warm.
But there has to be more.

It all came to pass,
All fell inot my hands
Like a five-petalled leaf,
But there has to be more.

Nothing eveil was lost,
Nothing good was in vain,
All ablaze with clear light
But there has to be more.

Life gathered me up
Safe under its wing,
My luck always held,
But there has to be more.

Not a leaf was burnt up
Not a twig ever snapped...
Clean as glass is the day,
But there has to be more.

KEEPING THINGS WHOLE - mark strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

ANGELS (excerpt) - rainer maria rilke

angels
all of them
have weary mouths
and bright souls without a seam
and a longing (as towards sin)
goes sometimes through
their dreams...

A TOMB FOR ANATOLE (excerpt) - stephen marlame

oh you understand that if i consent to live
to seem to forget you
it is to feed my pain
and so that this apparent forgetfulness
can spring forth more horribly
in tears at some random moments
in the middle of this life
when you appear to me.