There Is No Question I Am Someone Starving. There Is No Question I Am Making This Journey To Find Out

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

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

of burning but unwasting fire

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

he does not understand the reason for the moon

Garous Abdolmalekian, Long Poem of Loneliness tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

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

Are there two ways of knowing the world? a submissive and a devouring way. They end up roughly the same place.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

Ada Limón, It’s The Season I Often Mistake

For why is it meaningless to write with no other function than to assuage fear? Doesn’t that function in itself have a meaning? And why fear the dismantling of language’s semantic function, its being representational of meaning, when that is but one more fear that will drive those in opposition to écriture to write?

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

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 want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.

Ada Limón, It Begins With The Trees

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