… yes, all of my life I have lived in a painting called Paradise with its frame of black varnish and gold leaf, and I am told some girls slide their fingers over the frame and feel the air outside of it, and some even climb over the edge and plummet into whatever
is beyond it. Some say it is hell, and some say just another, bolder paradise, and some say a dark wilderness, and some say an unswept museum or library floor, and some say a long-lost love waits there wearing bloody riding clothes, returned from war, and some say freedom, which is a word that tastes strange, like a green plum.
“I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it—
living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”
— Richard Siken, from “Birds Hover the Trampled Field”, published in “War of the Foxes”
"Everyone is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end."
"Her pleasure […] must arise from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousands poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness—"
