"your body like a searchlight / my poverty revealed" - Take This Longing by Leonard Cohen ---- "My tongue remembers your wounded flavor. / The vein in my neck / adores you..." - "The City in Which I Love You" by Li-Young Lee ---- "I / drag my extinction in search of you...." - "The City in Which I Love You" by Li-Young Lee ---- "dead drunk on red wine / digging for the sunlight" - from "Better to Be Lost" in Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen ---- "I'm porous with travel fever / But you know I'm so glad to be on my own / Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger / Can set up trembling in my bones / I know no one's going to show me everything / We all come and go unknown / Each so deep and superficial / Between the forceps and the stone." - Hejira by Joni Mitchell ---- "I'm traveling in some vehicle / I'm sitting in some cafe / A defector from the petty wars / Until love sucks me back that way." - Hejira by Joni Mitchell ---- "Stand up straight at the foot of your love / I lift my shirt up" - Bloodbuzz Ohio by The National ---- "If I love her, it's because I rediscover my wounds in her." - Emil Cioran ---- "I am in tears / writing this--as / every night. // Why? Why--indeed? / Something loves life / and lives in me." - Cid Corman ---- "What makes you read the contours of your body / like the lines engraved inside a palm, so that / I cannot see them now except as fate?" - Rainer Maria Rilke ---- "You do not have to love me / just because / you are all the women / I have ever wanted / I was born to follow you / every night / while I am still / the many men who love you // I meet you at a table / I take your fist between my hands / in a solemn taxi / I wake up alone / my hand on your absence / in Hotel Discipline // I wrote all these songs for you / I burned red and black candles / shaped like a man and a woman / I married the smoke / of two pyramids of sandalwood / I prayed for you / I prayed that you would love me / and that you would not love me" - "You Do Not Have To Love Me" by Leonard Cohen ---- "Didn't I stand there once, / white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper, / swearing I'd never go back? / And hadn't you kissed the rain from my mouth? / And weren't we gentle and awed and afraid, / knowing we'd stepped from the room of desire / into the further room of love? / And wasn't it sacred, the sweetness / we licked from each other's hands? / And were we not lovely, then, were we not / as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?" - "Anniversary" by Cecilia Woloch