“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”

“I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.”

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

“For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

“I am flushed and warm.I think I may be enormous,I am so stupidly happy,My wellingtonsSquelching and squelching through the beautiful red.”

“If you have no past or no future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait.”

“The Eye-MoteBlameless as daylight I stood lookingAt a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,Tails streaming against the greenBackdrop of sycamores. Sun was strikingWhite chapel pinnacles over the roofs,Holding the horses, the clouds, the leavesSteadily rooted though they were all flowingAway to the left like reeds in a seaWhen the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,Needling it dark. Then I was seeingA melding of shapes in a hot rain:Horses warped on the altering green,Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,Beasts of oasis, a better time.Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:Red cinder around which I myself,Horses, planets and spires revolve.Neither tears nor the easing flushOf eyebaths can unseat the speck:It sticks, and it has stuck a week.I wear the present itch for flesh,Blind to what will be and what was.I dream that I am Oedipus.What I want back is what I wasBefore the bed, before the knife,Before the brooch-pin and the salveFixed me in this parenthesis;Horses fluent in the wind,A place, a time gone out of mind.--written 1959”