gripped in the arms of delirium

It started here, on a blog I'd never read before: an enigmatic series of portraits that showed up on a texture search for antique lace I was doing for a separate project. Along with these haunting words:

"I tried to forget
but you grew roots round my ribcage
and sprouted flowers
just below my collar bones.
All day I pick their petals
but I have not yet ascertained
whether you love me
or not"

And thereupon began the search for the rest of that quote.

I found this, which is a tutorial that just begs me to track down items for it and make it for one of my own walls; I found this, which contains a great many fascinating quotes; and then, I found this. But no last name was given, so I went to the "about" section of that blog. And I found another:

i have known the ticking of the clock
and i stumbled down the concrete sidewalk
broken where the weeds pushed through
there are too many stars tonight
i can not count them all

the music sounds different now
thinner
stolen by the fleeting hours
and the broken watch
no longer keeping steady time
there is nothing so loud as memory

So now I have two enigmatic snippets of prose, and only one name: "anna".

And then I found her blog.

So, is the author of these fragments Anna Peters? Budding photographer, writer, potentially poet and seeker? It is, as evidenced by this, which is a fascinating offer I'm now going to save up to get.

Because the prose piece that started this, reposted here from an earlier, unsaved post, can be had for twenty dollars from her print service (where you can also buy prints of her photographic work, on the main site). For those twenty bills, she will type your favorite selection out (assuming it's not marked "personal") on cardstock, put it in a vintage frame, and sign it and date it.

A bargain, I muse, at thrice the price.

here is the truth about december:

and the world splits into inside and outside,
softened by the silence of frozen impressions collecting in drifts.
groundfrost and stiff joints, blood dulled to lukewarm;
small pleasures like small lights clinging to skeleton trees,
no two the same.

In my current struggles between embattled sleep and fatigued waking, her words are perhaps speaking stronger to me than they would otherwise. But I can practically taste them on my tongue, soft as mist and sharp as sugar, leaden with old melancholy worn into nostalgia.

Here is the small truth
hidden between the drops of dancing rain:
it was always everything
and will ever be nothing at all.

I would kiss the clouds if I could,
leaden with water as they are,
for the taste of perpetuity.

I deplore that I first found her words (and in a real sense, found them nearly everywhere, the same day) with no attribution, but I am very glad I found them, in the end.

she thinks she might be turning into something nocturnal
it has to do with the street lamps
and how they purr into the glazed night
a bed cowering in the wrong corner
and the eternal hurricane whose eye rests
just behind her temples
and she wonders sometimes
what kind of dust she would find
in the corners of her skeleton
if she ever took the time to let it settle

Anna Peters. I am very pleased you exist in this world. Very pleased, indeed.