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Édouard Manet Bouquet of Flowers, 1882

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The garden admires you. For your sake it smears itself with green pigment, the ecstatic reds of the roses, so that you will come to it with your lovers. And the willows— see how it has shaped these green tents of silence. Yet there is still something you need, your body so soft, so alive, among the stone animals. Admit that it is terrible to be like them, beyond harm.

— Louise Glück, The Garden

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Dr. Dain L. Tasker, A Rose, 1936

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I had come to a strange city without belongings: in the dream, it was your city, I was looking for you. Then I was lost, on a dark street lined with fruit stands. There was only one fruit: blood oranges. The markets made displays of them, beautiful displays— how else could they compete? And each arrangement had, at its center, one fruit, cut open. Then I was on a boulevard, in brilliant sunlight. I was running; it was easy to run, since I had nothing. In the distance, I could see your house; a woman knelt in the yard. There were roses everywhere; in waves, they climbed the high trellis. Then what began as love for you became a hunger for structure: I could hear the woman call to me in common kindness, knowing I wouldn't ask for you anymore— So it was settled: I could have a childhood there. Which came to mean being always alone.

— Louise Glück, Marathon: The Beginning

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Slim Aarons, Dining Al Fresco On Capri, 1980

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It isn't just the beauty of the tropical sunset, she thought, the importance of it. In Oakland the sun set into the Pacific each evening and it was the end of another day. When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever; the sun will just keep on falling into the sea.

— Lucia Berlin

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Robert Faber, Midnight Lace, 1995

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I think now it is better to love no one than to love you. Here are my black clothes, the tired nightgowns and robes fraying in many places. Why should they hang useless as though I were going naked? You liked me well enough in black; I make you a gift of these objects. You will want to touch them with your mouth, run your fingers through the thin tender underthings and I will not need them in my new life.

— Louise Glück, Here Are My Black Clothes

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Hye-Sook Yoo F241001, 2024

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You spent your life with a man, first you were kids together, then you had to mark things off with an X: voting cards, moving boxes, finally his name, like an honorific. He became an X in a sketched ring, your ex-man, like Leonardo's beautiful nudes. You could understand why someone would want to sketch naked men all day, in between inventing things. If you touch a beautiful man, you have just invented the universe, that alternate one, in which you laugh and are kind to children and sway on Ferris wheels and moral questions; or you become another kind of inventor, brilliant and windblown in the wilderness, pigmenting the canvas with the fallout, your great work, destroyer of worlds.

— Eva H. D., Study of Proportions