The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
Once you’ve lived in France, you don’t want to live anywhere else, including France.
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?
Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.
I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.
A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.
I don’t want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.
Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
I am often asked why I write, and I don’t know really – I just want to.
Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
I’m heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o’-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail.