God, who am I?
Ready for a new life.
I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.
I don’t see what women see in other women,” I’d told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. “What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?” Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, “Tenderness.
I love the people,′ I said. ‘I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.
I don’t see,′ I said, ’how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you’re young you’re so self-reliant. You don’t even need much religion.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she’ll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.
Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can’t understand a word he’s saying.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
And I knew in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.
I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.
I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city’s mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.
I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.
I liked looking at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.
This is my first snow at Smith. It is like any other snow, but from a different window, and there lies the singular charm of it.
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.