Mark Strand

“There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.”

“She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.”

“I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?”

“How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")”

“From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's allThere was to it.”

“It came to my house.It sat on my shoulders.Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.”

“In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.”

“These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.”

“We all have reasonsfor moving.I moveto keep things whole.”

“Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.”

“We are reading the story of our livesAs though we were in itAs though we had written it”

“One clear night while the others slept, I climbedthe stairs to the roof of the house and under a skystrewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becominglike bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the longwhispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approachof a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stoodon that lonely height watching the slow swells of the seabreak on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear...Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with allthat the world offers would you come only because I was here?”

“The Coming of LightEven this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air.Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.”

“Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.”

“Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.”

“When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body's been.”

“Each moment is a placeyou've never been.”

“The ultimate self-effacementis not the pretense of the minimal,but the jocular considerations of the maximalin the manner of Wallace Stevens.”

“...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.”

“No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.”

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.”