And you wait, you wait for that one thing

that will infinitely enlarge your life;

the gigantic, the stupendous,

the awakening of stones,

depths turned round toward you.

The volumes bound in rust and gold

flicker dimly on the shelves;

and you think of lands traveled across,

of paintings, of the clothes of

women found and lost.

And then suddenly you know: it was then.

You rise, and before you

stands the fear and prayer and shape of a vanished year.

​

Memory, Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Edward Snow)

The bird that sang to me in the twilight
was the daughter of a bird that sang to Thomas Hardy
I knew her by the lucent tones

The grey sky had begun to release a winter storm
the bird sang on, I thought about Hardy—
neither he nor I consoled by this trilling song—

I mean to say so without bitterness
I mean to say it of my hopelessness
that evening in the sheltering woods

as if each note poured from its throat
an imperturbably natural thing
were designed to mock our heavy human wishes

then damn it how I strode my boots sliding over wet leaves
leaving prints in the crisp white at wood’s edge
home I walked in a darkness lit by snowfall

The right place for love, I repeated. The right place for love.

​

Thrush, Alice Ostriker

Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.

Or the space between thoughts:
instants when the mind is inventing
exactly what it thinks

and the mouth waits
to be filled with language.
Consider the space

between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet a cold metaphor
between them.

Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand:
vanishing years, filled with light.”

​

Consider the space between stars, Linda Pastan