Not To Act In This Tragedy, But To Live

Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I wish I had something else. A redemptive imagination

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

Of the moon all that's left is a stain upon the window.

Garous Abdolmalekian, Necklace tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire The Consumes All Before It

Cy Twombly, 1978

Oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas

Photo taken from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

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

The light is nervous and quiet -

Urszula M. Benka, To the Last Man on Earth, In the Hour of His Death tr. Regina Grol

there is also the waiting, the kind which has survived hundreds of tides and ebbs of hours...Take them along with my body.

Marzena Broda, [Come back to me...] tr. Regina Grol

let yourself be a living part of death

Garous Abdolmalekian, Forest tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

So often a metaphor arrives in the physical world with violence.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book