Lia Purpura QUOTES

1 " Red Bird in Snow

You can choose
to stop short -
or have it
not matter
not weigh
the brightness,
not hold
very still
and be
known
to yourself
again.
A thing
fills
with exactly
the radiance
you accord it. "

― Lia Purpura , It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (Poets, Penguin)

3 " Song I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening. "

― Lia Purpura , On Looking: Essays

5 " Beauty persists. Which, as truths go, complicates all we need to know. "

― Lia Purpura , It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (Poets, Penguin)

7 " Future Perfect

Where you were
before you were born,
and where you are
when you're not anymore
might be very close.
Might be the same place,
though neither is
as slippery
as being here but
imagining where
you will have been-
that point
where things land,
are finished, over, and
gone but not yet. "

― Lia Purpura