Great Throughts Treasury

"I have gone into the waste lonely places."

"I have come to a still, but not a deep center."

"I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight, all the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, desolation in immaculate public places."

"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one;"

"I learn by going where I have to go."

"I know the purity of pure despair, my shadow pinned against a sweating wall."

"I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more."

"I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form."

"I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet."

"I remember how they picked me up, a spindly kid, pinching and poking my thin ribs till I lay in their laps, laughing, weak as a whiffed."

"I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; and her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile; and how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her."

"I measure time by how a body sways."

"I suffered for birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower, my grief was not excessive. For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death:"

"I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass, the turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway, the paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,— All things innocent, hapless, forsaken."

"I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)"

"I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go... Great Nature has another thing to do to you and me, so take the lively air, and, lovely, learn by going where to go."

"If only I could nudge you from this sleep, my maimed darling, my skittery pigeon. Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover."

"I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother. Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones."

"Is that dance slowing in the mind of man that made him think the universe could hum?"

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade... Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire."

"It was beginning winter, an in-between time, the landscape still partly brown: the bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind, above the blue snow."

"Last night you lay a-sleeping? No! The room was thirty-five below; the sheets and blankets turned to snow. He'd got in: Dirty Dinky."

"Like a wet log, I sang within a flame. In that last while, eternity's confine, I came to love, I came into my own."

"Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will- the right thing happens to the happy man. The bird flies out, the bird flies back again; the hill becomes the valley, and is still; let others delve that mystery if they can. God bless the roots! -Body and soul are one the small become the great, the great the small; the right thing happens to the happy man. Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun, his being single, and that being all: the right thing happens to the happy man. Or he sits still, a solid figure when the self-destructive shake the common wall; takes to himself what mystery he can, and, praising change as the slow night comes on, wills what he would, surrendering his will till mystery is no more: No more he can. The right thing happens to the happy man."

"Like witches they flew along rows keeping creation at ease; with a tendril for needle they sewed up the air with a stem."

"Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm! The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil; All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe."

"Love begets love. This torment is my joy."

"Love is not love until love's vulnerable. She slowed to sigh, in that long interval."

"May you live out your life without hate, without grief and your hair ever blaze, in the sun, in the sun, when I am undone, when I am no one."

"My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,"

"May my silences become more accurate."

"Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark…"

"Nothing would give up life: even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath."

"Nudges a sand-crumb loose."

"Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley."

"So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition."

"Some have held the eye to be the instrument of lechery, more furtive than the hand in low and vicious venery-not so! Its rape is gentle, never more violent than a metaphor."

"Over the low, barnacled, elephant-colored rocks, come the first tide-ripples, moving, almost without sound, toward me, running along the narrow furrows of the shore, the rows of dead clam shells."

"Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire"

"She sailed until the calm morning, carrying her full cargo of roses."

"She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing we did make)."

"Slow, slow, as a fish she came, slow as a fish coming forward, swaying in a long wave; her skirts not touching a leaf, her white arms reaching towards me."

"Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys."

"The indignity of it! - With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave."

"The darkness has its own light."

"The body and the soul know how to play in that dark world where gods have lost their way."

"The living all assemble! What's the cue? — Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!"

"The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end."

"The mind enters itself, and God the mind, and one is One, free in the tearing wind."

"The pure serene of memory in one man — A ripple widening from a single stone winding around the waters of the world."