Date: 1892

"Remorse is cureless,—the disease / Not even God can heal; / For 't is his institution,-- / The complement of hell."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)

Date: 1990

"now you see the / two doctors, behind / you, in mind's eye, / probe into your anus, / or ass, or bottom, / behind you, the roto- / rooter-like device / sees all up, concludes / 'like a worn-out inner tube'"

— Creeley, Robert (1926-2005)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 2002

A landscape may poise like "A postcard in front of us / As though we'd settled it there, just so, / Halfway between the mind's eye and the mind, just halfway."

— Wright, Charles (b. 1935)

Date: 2002

"Of the friend watching him leave remembering / the story of her body / with his once and the stories of their children / made with other people and how his mind went on / pressing hers like a body."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2006

"If our thoughts / and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste / of bile when we're defeated and be flavored / faintly with grace on better days?"

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: March, 2014

"Culture: a kind of knife: / cuts one way     opens / your brain to a certain / breed of light     shaves / consciousness to its // purpose, its cross."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)