I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.
Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.
I knew chemistry would be worse, because I’d seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then –.
Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream.
There is no life higher than the grasstops.
You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.
The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.
What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?
I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard’s study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye’s darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study.
Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses.
I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole – A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...
I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.
Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.
What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit’s cry may be wilder But it has no soul.