All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morningin the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would ratherplumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinctand imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is –so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.”

“My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.The vein in my neckadores you. A swordstands up between my hips,my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.”

“You too?” She asked Ruth. “How do your poems start out?””They start as a lump in the throat,” she said.”

“Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherized upon a table.Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,The muttering retreatsOf restless nights in one-night cheap hotelsAnd sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question…Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”Let us go and make our visit.We have lingered in the chambers of the seaBy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brownTill human voices wake us, and we drown.”

“RaptureI can feel she has got out of bed.That means it is seven a.m.I have been lying with eyes shut,thinking, or possibly dreaming,of how she might look if, at breakfast,I spoke about the hidden place in herwhich, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,if such things are possible, she came.I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.I imagine her hair would fall about her faceand she would become apparently downcast,as she does at a concert when she is moved.The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyesand there she is, next to the bed,bending to a low drawer, picking overvarious small smooth black, white,and pink items of underwear. She bendsso low her back runs parallel to the earth,but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,lift toward the east—what can I say?Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.Her breasts fall full; the nipplesare deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron barsof the gate under the earth where those who could not lovepress, wanting to be born again.I reach out and take her wristand she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,rummaging in the same low drawer.The clock shows eight. Hmmm.With huge, silent effort of great,mounded muscles the earth has been turning.She takes a piece of silken clothfrom the drawer and stands up. Under the fallsof hair her face has become quiet and downcast,as if she will be, all day among strangers,looking down inside herself at our rapture.”

“A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.”

“the flames are silent,Peace is violent,Tears are frozen’cause massacre was chosen.~~ 26/11– Mumbai terror attack memories”

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.”

“With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,– What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”

“Know that we have met before and that we will meet again. I will find my way to you in the next life, and every life after that.”

“How surely gravity’s law,strong as an ocean current,takes hold of the smallest thingand pulls it toward the heart of the world.Each thing—each stone, blossom, child—is held in place.Only we, in our arrogance,push out beyond what we each belong tofor some empty freedom.If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin againto learn from the things,because they are in God’s heart;they have never left him.This is what the things can teach us:to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.”

“But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.”

“If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves wit it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.”

“I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.”

“Whatever you get out of poetry – take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.”