[before our own comprehension] (preliminary

Death being the first form of Life which we have had the power to Contemplate, our entrance here being [before our own comprehension] (preliminary to our own) an Exclusion from comprehension, it is [strange] amazing that the fascination of our own predicament does not entice us more. With such sentences as these directly over our Heads we are as exempt from Exultation as the Stones –

Emily Dickinson, worksheet jotting, published in The New England Quarterly, 1955



Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
Which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
Of fear to the horizon

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from the title poem in The Heat Bird, 1983