Poems who are my closest friends, my softest family.

Poems that are as solid and constant as trees to me.

THE BALLOON OF THE MIND

Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

(W. B. Yeats)

Poems whose sinews map the otherwise in my own.

GNOSTICISM III

First line has to make your brain race that’s how Homer does it,
that’s how Frank O’Hara does it, why
at such a pace
Muses
slam through the house— there goes one (fainting) up the rungs
of your strange BULLFIGHT, buttered
almost in a nearness
to skyblue
Thy pang — Pollock yourself!
Just to hang on to life is why

(Anne Carson)

Poems that aim to do what music does with the light— but differently.

Poems that hide in strange bathrooms to laugh at what language does to them.

Poems that stammer between marks made by chestnut trees on sidewalks in Paris.

Go blind now, today:
eternity also is fully of eyes —
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of the words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness.

(Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger)

Poems that own me.

Poems that know what they have known since they were children.

LANGUAGE MY COUNTRY

Language: my country
where night
rhymes with light, death
with breath—

And from childhood on the gift
of seeing world the way
the dying see

it: things shining

in the light of their imminent disappearance.

(Franz Wright)