Charles

“Space mildews at our touch.
The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—
aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?
A million insects die every twilight,
no one even finds their corpses.
Death, slowly moving among the bleached clouds,
knows us better than we know ourselves.
I am gliding backward away from those who knew me
as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.
I can be replaced a thousand times,
a box containing death.
When you put out your hand to touch me
you are already reaching toward an empty space.
\
— Adrienne Rich, “Moth Hour,” Necessities of Life<.i>(Norton January 1, 1966)”
― Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life

“Space mildews at our touch.
The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—
aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?
A million insects die every twilight,
no one even finds their corpses.
Death, slowly moving among the bleached clouds,
knows us better than we know ourselves.
I am gliding backward away from those who knew me
as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.
I can be replaced a thousand times,
a box containing death.
When you put out your hand to touch me
you are already reaching toward an empty space.”
― Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life

“I know the power of words / seeming trifles that fall / like petals beneath the heel-taps of dance. / But man with his soul, his lips, his bones. — Vladimir Mayakovsky, These haunting lines are from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s final, unfinished poem, "Past One O'Clock" (often translated as "The Incident is Closed"), drafted just before his suicide on April 14, 1930.”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky

“Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon

I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonish-
ment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of
the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings,
failing to distinguish between them. I have grown tired of
so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud
shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and

forth across the lake, of peering into the dark, hoping to find
an image of a self as yet unborn. Let plainness enter the eye,
plainness like the table on which nothing is set, like a table that
is not yet even a table.

Mark Strand, Almost Invisible.(Random House 2012)”
― Mark Strand, Almost Invisible: Poems