68 quotes
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)
They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
The Poet and the World (1996)
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)
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick themselves up, after all.Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son,
the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,
a tiny creature, made up of two pupils
and whatever simply could not be left out...
Poems New and Collected (1998)
They were or they weren't.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
Swallowed them up or it didn't.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
If there are angels
they must, I hope,
find this convincing,
this merriment dangling from terror,
not even crying Save me Save me
since all of this takes place in silence.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I shake my memory.
Maybe something in its branches
that has been asleep for years
will start up with a flutter.No.
Clearly I'm asking too much.
Nothing less than one whole second.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
Born.
So he was born, too.
Born like everyone else.
Like me, who will die.
The son of an actual woman.
A new arrival from the body's depths.
A voyager to Omega.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
Yes, the memory still moves her.
Yes, just a little tired now. Yes, it will pass.
You may get up. Thank her. Say good-bye. Leave,
passing by the new arrivals in the hall.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
My cry could only waken him. And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
The counting of weekdays
would inevitably seem to be
a senseless activity;
dropping letters in the mailbox
a whim of foolish youth;
the sign "No Walking On The Grass"
a symptom of lunacy.
Poems New and Collected (1998)
Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.
Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow.
One had to hurry, to get on with life
before the sun went down,
before the first snow.
Poems New and Collected (1998)