“Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.”

“The dreamer in herHad fallen in love with me and she did not know it.That moment the dreamer in meFell in love with her and I knew it”

“The ShellThe sea fills my earwith sand and with fear.You may wash out the sand,but never the soundof the ghost of the seathat is haunting me.”

“I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees and consultantsEffaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.You trembled with the new life of those engines.That first morning,Before your first class at College, you sat thereSipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,What eyes waited at the back of the classTo check your first professional performanceAgainst their expectations. What assessorsWaited to see you justify the costAnd redeem their gamble. What a furnaceOf eyes waited to prove your metal. I watchedThe strange dummy stiffness, the misery,Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, uglyHalf-approximation to your ideaOf the properties you hoped to ease into,And your horror in it. And the tannedAlmost green undertinge of your faceShrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaitedHead pathetically tiny.You waited,Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezersOf the life that judges you, and I sawThe flayed nerve, the unhealable face-woundWhich was all you had for courage.I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,Were terrors that killed you once already.Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.That blue suit.A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.”

“You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.”

“The Other"She had too much so with a smile you took some.Of everything she had you hadAbsolutely nothing, so you took some.At first, just a little.Still she had so much she made you feelYour vacuum, which nature abhorred,So you took your fill, for nature's sake.Because her great luck made you feel unluckyYou had redressed the balance, which meantNow you had some too, for yourself.As seemed only fair. Still her ambitionClaimed the natural right to screw you up Like a crossed out page, lossed into a basket.Somebody, on behalf of the gods,Had to correct that hubris.A little touch of hatred steadied the nerves.Everything she had won, the happiness of it,You collectedAs your compensationFor having lost. Which left her absolutely Nothing. Even her life wasTrapped in the heap you took. She had nothing.Too late you saw what had happened.It made no difference that she was dead.Now that you had all she had ever hadYou had much too much. Only you Saw her smile, as she took some.At first, just a little.”

“I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.Inaction, no falsifying dreamBetween my hooked head and hooked feet:Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.The convenience of the high trees!The air's buoyancy and the sun's rayAre of advantage to me;And the earth's face upward for my inspection.My feet are locked upon the rough bark.It took the whole of CreationTo produce my foot, my each feather:Now I hold Creation in my footOr fly up, and revolve it all slowly -I kill where I please because it is all mine.There is no sophistry in my body:My manners are tearing off heads -The allotment of death.For the one path of my flight is directThrough the bones of the living.No arguments assert my right:The sun is behind me.Nothing has changed since I began.My eye has permitted no change.I am going to keep things like this.”