“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 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.”

“It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems—he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.”

“Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry.”

“The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.”

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