From Now On It Is Not Dying We Must Fear, But Living.

Tomorrow either I will murder you or you will rinse the knife in water

Garous Abdolmalekian, Flashback tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Love like the horse chestnut loves carbon,

like the sun isn’t millions of miles away

or doomed. Love like a blue fir amongst white pines,

like a wide shovel opening the earth. Rewind

your favorite moments over early dinners:

the correct identification of an olive tree, climbing

65 feet up a fat trunk, turning backpack pockets

into houses for leaves. Love as eagerly as sprouting seeds,

as hungry as a goat up an argan tree. Love like you are

spotting a red squirrel for the first time. Relish in your blooming

knowledge of Latin, wood chopping, propagation. Love as easy as

hibiscus roots drink rain. Breathe in the smell

of earth-drenched boots. Savor the quick-flowing photos of pheasants and hedgehogs and newts.

Live like a pioneer species. Love like sempervirents: evergreen.

Love like every green thing ever planted

will live long and never burn

- Christina Thatcher, How to Love a Gardener

the smoke / carries my longing / - to Heaven

Barbara Brandys, By the Fire tr. Regina Grol

the one that teaches water to become ice, helps grief remember how to become tears.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Raptures could be little or large, could come one after the other in a torrent, or singly and separated by long dullness. For him life was a constant drama of seeing and blindness, but, when seeing, the world would suddenly seem to him laden.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Nervous awe and apprehension are born out of proximity and attention. The greater the intimacy between these cultures and nature, the greater the tension. The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

to want and to wonder are parallel actions

- Jessica Fisher, Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics