Marge Piercy – The Seven of Pentacles

“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.”

Ai – Nothing But Color

“and I’m climbing them past the moon and the sun, past darkness into white. I mean to live”

Raymond Carver – Still Looking Out for Number One

“I’ll sleep where I damn well feel like it —where I sleep best when you’re away and can’t hold you the way I do. On the broken sofa in my study”

Maureen Kennelly – Note

“Just once let’s imagine a word for the memory that lives beyond the body, that circles and sets all things alight.”

Thomas Lux – A Little Tooth

“And you, your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue nothing. You did, you loved, your feet are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.”

W.S. Graham – To My Wife at Midnight

“Where we each reach, sleeping alone together, nobody can touch.”

Robert Graves – She tells her love while half asleep

“She tells her love while half asleep,
in the dark hours, with half-words whispered low”

Elizabeth Bishop – Breakfast Song

“to sleep there without you, without the easy breath and nightlong, limblong warmth”

Thom Gunn – Thoughts on Unpacking

“Now, as I sweep it clean, I realize that love is an arranging.”

Rilke – I am, you anxious one

“My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness?”

Frank O’Hara – To You

“if the moon or a gasping candle sheds a little light or even dark you become a landscape in a landscape with rocks and craggy mountains”

Eavan Boland – Eviction

“A woman leaves a courtroom in tears. A nation is rising to the light. History notes the second, not the first.”