Site icon Margaret Coombs

Felicitous Phrases

A page in which I collect metaphors, lines, sentences, and phrases that appeal to me.


These goddesses of
water were destined to be masters of their own desire,
guides of their own light. We must engrave on our
hearts: The place where goddesses are born. 

Jeannette L. Clariond, Who Were These Goddesses. Modern Poetry in Translation, no. 2, 2021. Focus on Mexico.

About binomial theorum I’m teeming with a lot of news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

W.S. Gilbert, I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General. The Pirates of Penzance.

Husband of Water, where is your Concubine of Snow?
Has she laced your flood of desert with a wine of snow?

by Agha Shahid Ali, Snow. In Call Me Ishamael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals.

Adulated something and was filled with piety for a nothing

by Ingeborg Bachman, tr. by Alexander Stillmark,
A Kind of Loss. In Modern Poetry In Translation, no. 3 2022.

that means me getting lost to
fellowship with grass soil and little
stones who tell me there is no clear
sense of when we leave this world

by CAConrad, Wondering About Our Demise While Driving to Disneyland with Abandon. Ecodeviance (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness.


But my Buddha is never all mine.

A mask, a headdress: my refuge.
I embrace dogs, an eagle,

parakeets, macaws. I endure
his cathedral of blood-red lies.

by Carolyn Kreiter Foronda, Wives: III. Frida Kahlo. The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Snow, white itself, whites itself
out and us along the way.

by Suphil Lee Park, No Day Has Been as Clear but We Kept Saying. Poetry, 2022.

All this life    there you are
trapped in yourself
surely you can
forgive a few more people

by Brenda Hillman, ::[in a place with no light]::. In a Few Minutes Before Later.

no
las palabras
no hacen el amor
hacen la ausencia
si digo agua ¿beberé?
si digo pan ¿comeré?

no
words
do not make love
they make absence
if i said water would i drink?
if i said bread would i eat?

Alejandra Pizarnik, On This Night, In This World. Translated by Yvette Siegert. From Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972.
I took the jar which has become 
my father's house, 
and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back 
for my mother as much as me, 
poured some of him in the planting holes 

by Ross Gay, burial. In catalog of unabashed gratitude
 

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

by Philip Larkin, The Mower.


Stress puking differs
from party puking &
stress drinking is nothing

like partying.

from This Year by Joan Kane

The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone

from February: The Boy Brueghel by Norman Dubie

Sandhill cranes flew over,
their calls like bones rattling in a wooden box.

by Diane Seuss, Allegory, in Poetry, October 2022.

One solution to the writer’s problem of how to convey colors that have no names: “It was a golden day with every shade of green imaginable just appearing.” Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month.


when I was young, I wanted to name paint samples.
varieties of blue like whispering night air, tragic
lake.

Blue by Laura Villarreal in Poetry, March 2023

The brown leaves are closing their hands and falling

by W.S. Merwin, Dry Ground. The Vixen.

It's Saturday afternoon and the crows glide down.
Black pages that lift and fall.

by Charles Wright, Laguna Blues.
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