Il Pleut

It’s Raining

It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in

memory

And it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my

life O little

drops

Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of

auricular cities

Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an

ancient music

Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and

below

Il Pleut

Guillaume Apollinaire

She was gone

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.

The Road
Cormac McCarthy

She knew her beauty’s power.

The goddess threw her snow-white arms around him
as he held back, caressing him here and there,
and suddenly he caught fire — the same old story,
the flame he knew by heart went running through him,
melting him to the marrow of his bones…
...she knew her beauty’s power.

The Aeneid [excerpt]
Virgil

Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.


Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?
Ron Koertge

so Edgar didn't rush off

If age teaches you anything, then one of the lessons is certainly not to hurry if you're already late...

Day Watch
Sergei Lukyanenko

I dont belong here.

I want you to notice
When I'm not around

Creep
Radiohead

welcome baby peters!

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Romeo and Juliet
Act II Scene 2

In the end,

In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides

fall in love with the sadness of another

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another

The First Dream
Billy Collins

a second chance

She closed the door behind him but he didn't hear it lock.

Cold Pursuit

T. Jefferson Parker