Inside The Chrysalis

Love letter from 1913 that opens up to form an art gallery.

“To love is not only to gaze at the other, but to gaze through the other, so wherever love sends me, I look.”

“Every love poem, I think, is a poem of grace. Because you can spend years in silence not knowing how to say I love you. Because you can spend years knowing what you need but not asking for it. Because you can spend years lifting, only to realize that you spent years lifting the wrong thing. Because someone’s hands can spend a lifetime in the blistered existence of the everyday only to spend a minute, years later, making calligraphy out of your skin. Because it only takes a second to be brought to your knees. Because it only takes a second for someone to lift you.”

In each caress of joy there was the magnetic miracle of love that knows the beauty of what it is caressing, knows it more deeply, for all its deprivations, for all its sacrifices, for all its openness to pain.

“The rose among the roses / Doesn’t resemble another rose.”

“Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That’s what time is like.”