*
Why are you so afraid of silence,
silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void
a hundred voices will thunder messages
you long to hear.
--Rumi
*
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
--Thomas Paine
*
The messiah will
only come
when he is no longer needed.
--Franz Kafka
*
Love happens when two
solitudes protect and greet
and touch eachother.
--Rilke
*
Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.
--William Blake
*
Every drought-resistant plant has its own story
each had to learn to live
with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
after the thunderstorm
each could do without deprivation

But where drought is the epic then there must be some
who persist, not by species-betrayal
but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study
of the price of continuity
a steady bargain
with the way things are.
--Adrienne Rich, “the Desert as a Garden of Paradise #4”
*
I am a lonely painter…I live in a box of paints.
I’m frightened by the devil and I’m drawn to those ones
that ain’t afraid.
You said love is touching souls…
Surely you’ve touched mine.
Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time.
You’re in my blood like holy wine.
You taste so bitter and so sweet.
I could drink a case of you
and still be on my feet.
--(you know who this is, don't you?)
*
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

To maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

But much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
it is only a door.
--Adrienne Rich
*
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
--William Blake
*
To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.
--William Butler Yeats
*
Out here in this desert we are testing bombs,

that’s why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
an acute angle of understanding
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery.

What we’ve had to give up to get here—
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place
except that it came with us and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out—
coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger
and list the equipment
we talk of people caring for each other
in emergencies—lacerations, thirst—
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.
--Adrienne Rich, “Trying to Talk with a Man”
*
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
—Henry David Thoreau
*
Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.
--John F. Kennedy
*
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
--Margaret Atwood, "variations on the word sleep"
*
To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
--Wendell Berry
*
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
--William Blake
*
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
--William Butler Yeats
*
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
--Jonathan Swift
*
Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
--Karl Marx
*
My mind is my own church.
--Thomas Paine
*
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
--Jonathan Swift