Beauty and Sadness

Desire is about vanishing. You dream of a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red juice.

As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn.

This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

And the universal subject of poetry? How did it happen there were so many landscapes, woods, gardens, beaches, rivers, trees, sunsets in poems to the beloved? Because poets more easily than others saw in nature the inevitable reference. Ancient towers, clouds, cataracts, mysterious tombs, sobbing of surf on rocks, bending of branches to the storm, loneliness of gravel banks in the afternoon, it was all a clear statement made to her, to the woman we love, the one who has the power to burn us to ashes. Everything in the world plots with everything else in the world in the wisest conspiracy of all, to bring us to the one we love.

What would he do without her? How could he go on? [She was] for him was the earth itself, life, blood, sunlight, glory, wealth, the realization of all his dreams. 

A very simple secret: Love. Everything in all the inanimate world that fascinates us, forests, plains, mountains, rivers, seas, valleys, steppes, and more, and more, cities, palaces, stones, more, the sky, sunsets, storms, yet more, the snow, still more, the night, the stars, the wind, all these things, empty and indifferent in themselves, were charged with meaning for us because, without our suspecting it, they held a foregleam of love.

Love is a terrible disease.

Was there perhaps some dark pleasure to be got from those painful fantasies? Did those perverse day-dreams only serve to make [her] ever more exciting, strange, and unattainable and therefore ever more deserving of his desire and his love?

If gentleness can be brutish, cruelty can sometimes be so closely wound in with sensitivity and gentleness that it is hard to know which is what. 

 ...thoughts of her, always of her, of that particular mouth, of those lips made in a certain way, of an arrangement of taut muscles (do you remember?), soft and fluid, with a curvature unlike all the others, of a fold, of a fullness, of a depth, of a warmth, of a dampness, of a surrender, of a descent, of a burning abyss.

thoughts like his, both obscene and exquisite...

Once the date was made, his whole body began to wait; it was painful but at the same time marvellous, hard to explain, almost the feeling of being the victim offered in a sacrifice, the whole body naked, with an abandoned outpouring of burning energy that flowed through every part of his limbs and his guts and his flesh. A charge of tremendous power, not at all animal or blind—on the contrary, poetic, full of dark obscenities.

Love? It’s a curse on your head and heart and you can’t escape it.

You hurt me With your desire For other. I am Who I am and I Am fond of myself.

i keep falling / in and out / of myself / just as i fell out of paradise

My health was perfect / Until you fell / On my head and pressed / Your lips of mist and ice / To mine / You burnt my tongue