What is a man, said Athos, who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides.
Like the moon, I want to touch placesjust by looking. To tellnew things at three in the morning, when we’re
I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
I do not believe home is where we’re born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defi...
Write to save yourself,’ Athos said, ‘and someday you’ll write because you’ve been saved.
The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it’s very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves....
In every childhood there is a door that closes. Only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have...
If the truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands.
When you are alone -- at sea, in the polar dark -- an absence can keep you alive.
Sometimes I can't look you in the eye; you're like a building that's burned out inside, with the outer wall still standing.
Last Night’s Moon,When will we next walk togetherunder last night’s moon? - Tu FuMarch aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early eveningcyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedytoques of low t...
[And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because...
The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way ar...
Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest...
Nothing erases the immoral act. Not forgiveness. Not confession. And even if the act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. Not act of violence i...
In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands....
And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is...
There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to le...
When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, star...
Reading a poem in translation, wrote Bialek, is like kissing a woman through a veil; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is...