Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.
Once, on a hot summer night, I had spent an hour kissing a hairy, ape-shaped law student from Yale because I felt sorry for him, he was so ugly.
She personifies the word cute. She is Cinderella and Wendy and Snow White.
They are good evidence to prove that poems which seem often to be constructed of arbitrary surreal symbols are really impassioned reorganizations of relevant fact.
God, what a life – living in the future and the past and existing merely in the present.
There was more small talk, more laughing, sidelong glances, more of the unspoken physical friction that makes each new conquest so delightful. In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in. There was something in Emile tonight, a touch of seriousness, a chemical magnetism, that met my mood the way two pieces of a child’s puzzle fit together.
Then I thought, how could this Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card?
It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstances, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own.
For me,” she wrote, “poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose.” Throughout.
I must write about the things of the world with no glazing.” She fought doggedly against the great suction into her own subjectivity: “I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself.” Something like this went through nearly every entry in her journal over long periods. In.
How she longed for winter then! – Scrupulously austere in its order Of white and black Ice and rock, each sentiment within border, And heart’s frosty discipline Exact as a snowflake.
Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best.
He kept smiling, as if the corners of his mouth were strung up on invisible wire.
Inertia oozed like molasses through Elaine’s limbs.
Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.
I am going for a long walk.
A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.
And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?
It is the exception that interests the devil.
Gee baby, you are rare.
The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.