“His vision, from the constantly passing bars,has grown so weary that it cannot holdanything else. It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,the movement of his powerful soft stridesis like a ritual dance around a centerin which a mighty will stands paralyzed.Only at times, the curtain of the pupilslifts, quietly. An image enters in,rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,plunges into the heart and is gone.”

“His gaze is from the passing of barsso exhausted, that it doesn't hold a thing anymore.For him, it's as if there were thousands of barsand behind the thousands of bars no world.The sure stride of lithe, powerful steps,that around the smallest of circles turns,is like a dance of pure energy about a center,in which a great will stands numbed.Only occasionally, without a sound, do the covers of the eyes slide open—. An image rushes in,goes through the tensed silence of the frame—only to vanish, forever, in the heart.- The Panther”

“His tired gaze - from passing endless bars -has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.to him there seem to be a thousand bars,and out beyond these bars exists no world.his supple gait, the smoothness of strong stridesthat gently turn in ever smaller circlesperform a dance of strength, centered deep withina will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable.but sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,the pupils of his eyes dilate as imagesof past encounters enter while through his limbsa tension strains in silenceonly to cease to be, to die within his heart.[the panther]”

“It seems to him there are / a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.” Whether the bars are real or metaphorical, when one has no control, it is as if nothing exists beyond the pain of this loss.”

“Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his street-shoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize.”

“I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again - from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this - that was the only way he could tolerate this cage”