The Collected Poems Quotes
"The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees / Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn / To elegiac dryads, and dour grass / Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness / However the grandiloquent mind may scorn / Such poverty." - November Graveyard
"Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade; / Midnight cloaks the sultry grove; / The black marauder, hauled by love / On fluent haunches, keeps my speed." - Pursuit
"By lack and loss these beggars encroach / On spirits tenderer than theirs, / Suffering-toughened beyond the fetch / Of finest conscience." - The Beggars
"‘No hardship then?’ he asks. ‘We’ll take / Whatever trial’s to come, so say true.’ / His bride echoes his word. At that, / Gerd whirls the ball ablaze: ‘Rough storm,’ she grants, ‘may wreak / Some havoc on tender limb, and yet / Strengthen that orchard thereby.’" - Crystal Gazer
"So hungered, she must wait in rage / Until bird-racketing dawn / When her shrike-face / Leans to peck open those locked lids, to eat / Crowns, palace, all / That nightlong stole her male." - The Shrike
"Sun was striking while chapel pinnacles over the roofs."
"The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry a scorpion stung its head."
"The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie the heat-cracked crickets congregate."
"In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead crowd foot to foot, head to head."
"The hanging man: By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me."
"The fountains are dry and the roses over. Incense of death."
"The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in."
"We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow."
"I am not a tree with my root in the soil, nor am I the beauty of a garden bed attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, unknowing I must soon unpetal."
"The stars are flashing like terrible numerals."
"The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, white as a knuckle and terribly upset."
"I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike."
"The deathly guests had not been satisfied with the rooms, or the smiles, or the beautiful rubber plants, or the sea, hushing their peeled sense like Old Mother Morphia."
"I am slow as the world. I am very patient, turning through my time, the suns and stars regarding me with attention."
"How the elements solidify! The moonlight, that chalk cliff in whose rift we lie back to back. I hear an owl cry from its cold indigo."
"I am a mountain now, among mountainy women. The doctors move among us as if our bigness frightened the mind."
"The yew’s black fingers wag; cold clouds go over. So the deaf and dumb signal the blind, and are ignored."
"It is the noise that appalls me most of all, the unintelligible syllables. It is like a Roman mob."
"The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position / With the same trees and headstones."
"My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin / Drops me from a terrible altitude."
"Surely the sky is not that color, / Surely the grass should be rippling."
"I die with variety — / Hung, starved, burned, hooked."
"O little gimlets — / What holes this papery day is already full of!"
"All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks."
"I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes."
"You peer from the door, / Sad hag. 'Every woman’s a whore.'"
"Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances."
"O my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open."
"The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf? / It is not mine. Do not accept it."
"I am a letter in this slot — / I fly to a name, two eyes."
"The train is dragging itself, it is screaming — / An animal / Insane for the destination."
"I do not will him to be exceptional. It is the exception that interests the devil."
"I wish millionaire uncles and aunts would umbrella like liberal toadstools in a shower of Chanel, Dior gowns."
"The sting of bees took away my father who walked in a swarming shroud of wings."
"The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans atop the broken universal clock."
"Water will run by rule; the actual sun will scrupulously rise and set."
"Time is a great machine of iron bars that drains eternally the milk of stars."
"The snow blows up behind; hide, hide, in the safe cave."
"Love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart."