William Bronk

“I want to tell my friends how beautiful / the world is. Not but what they know / it is terrible too--they know as well as I; / but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. / Because they are. And this is what they are; / and because it is and this is what it is. / You are my friend. The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.”

“Landscape is metaphor / and only metaphor. But, oh, I have loved it so.”

“A light, this side of the hills toward Argyle, / flowed like fog through the hollows, rose to the depth / of the hills, illumined me. I faded in it / as the world faded in me, dissolved in the light. / No one to know and nothing knowable. / Oh, we know that knowing is not our way; / but, the choice is ours, would make it our way, would leave / the world for the same world made knowable.”

“I want to be that Tantalus, unfed / forever, that my want's agony declare / that such as we want has nothing to say to the world; / if the world wants, it nothing wants for us. / Let me be unsatisfied.”

“Caress me, be kind. We have no history.”

“Reality is what we are ignorant of. ”

“For loss is what we live with all the time. / None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind / that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself / all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind.”