For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
What are men? Children who doubt.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars.
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
The classics can console. But not enough.
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
The English language is nobody’s special property.
I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
She’s a rare vase, out of a cat’s reach, on its shelf.