As With Nature, There Is Something About Love That Remains Ineffable, That Stands Outside Or Above Language.

“As with nature, there is something about love that remains ineffable, that stands outside or above language. This is so often where we—poets, lovers—fail–we use too many words, or too few words, or words that we think will tell someone how we feel but are ultimately unsuccessful. In love poetry, as in nature poetry, the challenge is double: even if we could see the other, how could we successfully communicate that experience? Poets are constantly gesturing towards the ineffable, arranging our words so that they make or represent something beyond human language. I often think of poetry as a medium between written language and music; it can communicate both literal linguistic meaning and something that is above that meaning, the way instrumental music communicates without accessing the means of spoken language. I see the potential in poetry to express the ineffable, as does [poet, Don] McKay: ‘Poetry comes about because language is not able to represent raw experience, yet it must.’”

— Annick MacAskill, from “To Say, To Kiss, To See: Notes on Love Poetry,” Arc Poetry Magazine (no. 88, Spring 2019)

eroticasa2:

“In her sweetness where she folds my wounds there is a flower that bees cannot afford. It is too rich for them and would change their wings into operas and all their honey into the lonesome maps of a nonexistent California county. When she has finished folding all my wounds she puts them away in a dresser where the drawers smell like the ghost of a bicycle. Afterwards I rage at her: demanding that her affections always be constant to my questions.”

Richard Brautigan, “In Her Sweetness Where She Folds My Wounds,” Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt (Delacorte Press, 1979) 

“我住長江頭， 君住長江尾； 日日思君不見君， 共飲長江水。 此水幾時休？ 此恨何時已？ 只願君心似我心， 定不負相思意。 I live upstream and you downstream, From night to night of you I dream. Unlike the stream you are not in view, Though both we drink from River Blue. When will the river no more flow？ When will my grief no more grow？ I wish your heart will be like mine， Then not in vain for you I pine.”

—

Song of Divination (卜算子) by Li Zhiyi (李之儀). Song Dynasty.

Born in Wudi County, Shandong, Li Zhiyi was a Song Dynasty Chinese poet and one of Su Shi’s disciples. Song of Divination plays on the theme of lovesickness between men and women. Using the Yangtze River as a metaphor for both distance and unity, the narrator expresses an intense yearning for their lover.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

“And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.”

— Douglas Coupland, from Life After God (Simon & Schuster, 2002)

“You, my love, are the perfect evening, arms outstretched to balance the tumbling sun in one hand, the cool moon in the other; you, the giver of light to the world. And when you come home, […] iridescence spins about your face, stardust lingers in the crease of your wrists, the crescent beds beneath your nails. And still you reach for me, enough shimmer left to light the doorway, the room, the dark space between my lips.”

— Karla K. Morton, “Shameless Love Poem,” Constant State of Leaping (Texas Review Press, 2014)

I was seven and searching. Sitting in therapy with no language for longing.

Donte Collins, “A Crown for My Birthmother”  (via buttonpoetry)