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

“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?”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“...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.”

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