Nothing gapes wider than my wound
I cry over this disaster, over everything,
and feel your death more than my life.

I walk over the stubble of the dead,
and without warmth or consolation from anyone
I leave my heart behind, and mind my business.

Death flew off with you too soon,
dawn dawned too soon,
you were put into earth too soon.

I won’t forgive lovestruck death,
I won’t forgive this indifferent life,
I won’t forgive the earth, or anything.


— Miguel Hernandez, from "Elegy" (translated by Don Share)

The poems deluged me. They came at me like wild bees.

~

I slowly withdraw from my body.

~

The space of loneliness. A slit in space. The eye of the abyss. The abyss is an overblown concept. No getting around it.

~

To express the truth. With a chisel. A word. With silence. With life.

~

Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.

~

This morning I suddenly catch myself: I’m not there, I’m so lost in thought, I don’t know what’s going on around me. Can you think yourself to death?

~

Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.

~

Never. Never. Never. I could fill a whole notebook with that word.

~

During the sleepless hours of the night a thought came to me that seemed important. I got up in the dark and wrote it down. In the morning I read: “I went looking for loneliness. But it found me.

~

I escape into sleep. Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die.

~

I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.

— Anna Kamienska, from A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

Georgia O'Keeffe

The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them--her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait--supposing that such a thing could happen--for a new desire to form, a desire following her death.

 — Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (translated by Richard Howard)

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value, it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.

— Edward Said, Orientalism

Writing a story, discovering a form, becomes for Conrad paradigmatic of the epistemological difficulties which beset him; to construct a narrative is to construct a moral order. But that order is condemned to be as precarious and provisional as the act of writing itself--a fragile and perilous enterprise, ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed...In working his fiction, then, the writer is shaping a vacuum, sculpting a void.

— Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory

Loss takes place
in the mouth first; the scream
possible only after
the mouth is empty.

If the veins on a man’s face
were to break free,
what would they touch first?

— Arlene Ang, from "Skin"

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

                                   ~

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free –
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you...


— Sylvia Plath, from "Tulips"

These tulips make me want to paint:
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,

Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,

Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they'll be missed.

The way they're somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who's in the mirror,

The one who can't tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older 

And give themselves up to the light.


— A.E. Stallings, "Tulips"

Myoung Ho Lee 

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn't the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They've been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,
   
like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.
   
They don't make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.
   
Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.
   
The vanished are just.
That's how we'll fade, too.

— Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "The Vanished" (translated by Rita Dove and Fred Viebahn)

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, Sunlight on the Floor, 1906

Fernando Lemos, Luz Teimosa, 1949

Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experience they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.

 — W.G. Sebald, "Unrecounted"

but writing down the words
alters what I want to remember
that which had no words
was a living breathing image
so now I have two versions of the same
today I can superimpose them
but tomorrow when I’m gone
only the words are left
signs evoking something
that no eye sees any more


— Remco Campert, from "Memo" (translated by Donald Gardner)