Don’t run away from grief, o soul. Look for the remedy inside the pain because the rose came from the thorn and the ruby came from a stone. - Jelaluddin Rumi

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need of God absolutely clear. - Khājeh Shams-od-Hafiz

If only there were a boat, low and long and loaded with all we’d brought or built: the fatal inattentions, anxieties and tics that time had sanctified, our good and bad intentions, rages, lapses, and aches. If only it were that easy, to stand only ankle-deep in the sullied water hoisting our shared cargo, sinking no further beneath its weight. If only the boat did not need a rower; we’d push it off together then wade to opposite banks absolved at last, forever buoyant, watching it go. - Chelsea Rathburn

The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness, and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief was my desire of you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one. - Pablo Neruda 1904 - 1973

I have gazed the black flower blooming her animal eye. Gacela oscura. Negra llorona. Along the clayen banks I follow her-astonished, gathering grief’s petals she lets fall like horns. Why not now go toward the things I love? Like Jacob’s angel, I touched the garnet of her wrist, and she knew my name. And I knew hers— it was Auxocromo, it was Cromóforo, it was Eliza. It hurtled through me like honeyed-rum. When the eyes and lips are touched with honey what is seen and said will never be the same. Eve took the apple in that ache-opened mouth, on fire and in pieces, from the knife’s sharp edge. In the photo her fist presses against the red-gold geometry of her thigh. Black nylon, black garter, unsolvable mysterium— I have to close my eyes to see. Achilles chasing Hektor round the walls of Ilium three times. How long must I circle the high gate above her knees? Again the gods put their large hands in me, move me, break my heart like a clay jar of wine, loosen a beast from some dark long depth—my melancholy is hoofed. I, the terrible beautiful Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered at the bronze manger of her collarbones. I do my grief work with her body—labor to make the emerald tigers in her hips leap, lead them burning green to drink from the violet jetting her. We go where there is love, to the river, on our knees beneath the sweet water. I pull her under four times until we are rivered. We are rearranged. I wash the silk and silt of her from my hands—now who I come to, I come clean to, I come good to.