“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”

“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.”

“The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”

“MirrorI am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.Whatever I see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.I am not cruel, only truthful-The eye of the little god, four cornered.Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so longI think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.Faces and darkness separate us over and over.Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Searching my reaches for what she really is.Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.I am important to her. She comes and goes.Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old womanRises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.--written 1960”

“It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.”

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”