Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
I’m hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.
I grow old on my bitterness.
I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.
All who love have lied.
I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
We are all writing God’s poem.
Daylight is nobody’s friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.
I am younger each year at the first snow.
The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.
I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren.
Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.