touching bottom

Written in letters that could touch bottom.

to stem the tide

Day after day, I will write the same poem in the sand, allowing the tide to erase it. Until I get it right, and then even the tide dare not touch it.

breathe the world in

Colette was a lifewatcher. To look she used all her senses at once—she heard, she touched, she breathed the world in, she stared with intense care, fixedly, like a cat, hypnotized.

Regardé, the last word Colette uttered before she died, was her living word for l’amour, la vie, le monde.

—Helen Bevington, “Colette and the Word Regardé” Beautiful Lofty People (Harcourt Brace, 1974))

artist books

I love looking at them: artist books. Some can't be handled, which I find annoying. Most are collector's items or museum pieces. Seems a sad fate for the text therein.

metaphor go ahead

Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do. And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what's too slippery or charged or difficult to touch.

—Mark Doty, “Souls on Ice”

touch of a lover

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

—Plato, The Republic

antitactile

So much sculpture begs to be touched but when these things are placed in museums it’s hands off.

greasy and slick

Slathered with unctuous blurbs, the book felt uncomfortably sticky to the touch.