• to drag from the guts / what’s in the guts / terror and hunger.

Zbigniew Herbert, from Chord of Light: Poems; “Mr. Cogito and Pop,”

• & you know now, that anything alone is a haunting & any two things together is a terror.

Yves Olade, “Iphigenia at Aulis”

• How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe. also troubled roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?

Mary Oliver, from “Heavy,” Thirst: Poems

• The darkness grew dense. Glutinous. Pushing through it became an effort. Like swimming underwater.

Arundhati Roy, "The God of Small Things"

• CHORUS: And the grace of the gods, I’m pretty sure, is a grace that comes by violence.

Aeschylus, "Agamemnon" (tr. Anne Carson)

• And rising from those other days, silent, / My own ghost confronts me.

Anna Akhmatova, tr. by D.M. Thomas, from “Three Autumns,”

• What voice has my voice got? Rage / gives flavor.

Kirsten Kaschock, from “Up Against Memoir,” published in Tarpaulin Sky

• I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!

William Carlos Williams, Danse Russe

• I have lost myself in the sea many times with my ear full of freshly cut flowers, with my tongue full of love and agony.

Federico García Lorca, excerpt of ‘Gacela De La Huida’. Tr. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili.

• beauty is but the beginning of terror. We can barely endure it and are awed when it declines to destroy us.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy,” from Duino Elegies