Either She Loves Him, Or She Is Resolved To.

the light is not something you see, exactly. You don't look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don't look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette. And you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet) although the fact that he is there, silent and absent beside a thin wisp of cigarette smoke, hammers you. You rest your chin on your hand, like a saint on a pillar. Moments elongate and drop. A radiance is hitting your skin from somewhere, every nerve begins to burn outward through the surface, your lungs float in a substance like rage, sweet as rage, no! - don't look.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

and in a windowless attic some of me is in the smoke rising from the chimney

Anna Frajlich, Here I Am tr. Regina Grol

I could feel his teeth, the inside of his mouth, the shape of his thighs, the texture of his skin. I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

I am the fire, says the fire. My body is a graveyard,

says the landscape. You’re welcome, says the landscape.

- Richard Siken, Landscape with Several Small Fires

You never refuse. You simply don't speak.

Alicja Rybałko, A Prayer for the Forbidden Fruit tr. Regina Grol

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. (Prescience? Perhaps.) 'Which means exactly what?' (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.) I tried to explain, but didn't do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. This is what I wrote: To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing,

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

to want and to wonder are parallel actions

- Jessica Fisher, Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics

Fragmentary Face of King Khafre

ca. 2520-2494 BCE | Old Kingdom, Egypt | Egyptian alabaster

Not to act in this tragedy, but to live

Alicja Rybałko, Curriculum Vitae tr. Regina Grol