What words of mine, will suffice, over-used, commonplace, falling short, I call upon, those men and women, now captive to the embrace of weeds, of moss, the occasional rose, and borrow, their words forgotten except for when remembered, woven impossibly, yet here, to be read apart, or better yet, strung together.
"We live in a world of motion and distance.”
“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
“The heart flies from tree to bird, from bird to distant star, from star to love; and love grows in the quiet house, turning and working, servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand."
"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."
"The act of writing defies all distance."
"Where do the words go when we have said them?"
"Do words outlast the world they describe?"
"The immense space suddenly becomes vacant: then illuminated."
"In which way are stars brighter than they are. When we have come to this decision. We mention many thousands of buds. And when I close my eyes I see them."
“I am being eaten away by light"
"I don’t know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It’s the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body.”
“Simultaneously, and without pity, the natural world and its physical laws restrict the human form and its capacities. All of us are trapped in our skins and drowning in gravity. Physics is unforgiving. Nature is predatory. We do not walk through a passive landscape."
"This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my rolling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it’s morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flicking things. We are completely surrounded."
“Still, what I want in my life is to be willing, to be dazzled, to cast aside the weight of facts, and maybe even, to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing - that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading."
"We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience… in life, too, changes and transitions flash before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane.”
"I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises.”
"Love is a thought, hidden in the darkness of the world."
"You exhale a fist of memory. I love you like weathering wood in a room of empty pianos.”
“Then comes the moon, marvelously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles."
"Our love moved with the slowness of an object… Blueshifted as sitting for a portrait where you can’t grudge time. It awakened fingers at the tip of our words, chambers in the heart. Then suddenly everything too close, a splinter under the skin… Vertigo of reflections, the smooth surface lost in eddies and currents."
"What is this desire that nothing can change or deflect when everything changes? The lack of forgetting is the same thing as the lack in being, since being is nothing other than forgetting. The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides…"
"That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged."
"There is always somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who refuses to be submerged; whose identity therefore one wishes to make crouch beneath one’s own."
"His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other."
“I want to know my own will and to move with it. And I want, in the hushed moments when the nameless draws near, to be among the wise ones - or alone. I want to mirror your immensity. I want never to be too weak or too old to bear the heavy, lurching image of you. I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false. I want to stay clear in your sight. I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.”
"You sent for me to talk to you of art; and I have obeyed you in coming. But the main thing I have to tell you is,—that art must not be talked about."
"In the poem, on the page, as you are for me, not a shadow, but a shade whose darkness drops from no object
but is itself yourself, a form of time, spanning nothing, never is your name."
"I don’t think writers are supposed to give answers."
"He is exactly the poem I wanted to write."
"The terrible fidelity the sculptor shows, refusing all. A blind man couldn’t, fumbling with his fingertips, discover: the eye within the eye."
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