61 quotes
And how can we talk of order overall
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Poems New and Collected (1998)
In Heraclitus' river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish,
a fish kneels to the fish, a fish sings to the fish,
a fish begs the fish to ease its fishy lot.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I'd have to be really quick
to describe clouds —
a split second's enough
for them to start being something else. Their trademark:
they don't repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come can't be undone.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
It's shocking, the positions,
the unchecked simplicity with which
one mind contrives to fertilize another!
Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I remember it so clearly —
how people, seeing me, would break off in midword.
Laughter died.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
My dreams — even they're not as populous as they should be.
They hold more solitude than noisy crowds.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
Secret codes resound.
Doubts and intentions come to light.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I'm sorry that my voice was hard.
Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried,
look down on yourselves from the stars.
They heard me and lowered their eyes.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I'm working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me
how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily
declined in human form, just now making such a fuss
about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what the sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
We're extremely fortunate
not to know precisely
the kind of world we live in.
One would have
to live a long, long time,
unquestionably longer
than the world itself.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.""I don't have a door," says the stone.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
Here we are, naked lovers,
beautiful to each other—and that's enough.
The leaves of our eyelids our only covers,
we're lying amidst deep night.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
The going's rough, and so we need the laugh
of bright incisors, molars of goodwill.
Our times are still not safe and sane enough
for faces to show ordinary sorrow.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
So he's got to have happiness,
he's got to have truth, too,
he's got to have eternity —
did you ever!
Poems New and Collected (1998)