I like to look up, wild, at an infinite sky

Thus we sit, myself thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich it is to love the world.

“Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.”

Love others so radically they wonder why.

Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks on a house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea, a heart the size of Arizona but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pulled down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever alter you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars. And here you stand. Heart like a four poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.

The prince fought valiantly. He slayed the dragon. The princess cried for days. She loved that dragon.

Tell me where it hurts, she’d say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where. But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.

I think, I too, have known autumn too long.