The Complete Poems Quotes
"We are of little faith. We talk too much."
"A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind."
"For a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.… Not til we are lost … do we begin to find ourselves."
"I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said … but did not."
"You lay in the nest of your real death, Beyond the print of my nervous fingers."
"I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart."
"The grass speaks. I hear green chanting all day."
"It is a summer evening. The yellow moths sag against the locked screens."
"I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night."
"I have invented a lie. There is no other day but Monday."
"You, my bachelor analyst, who sat on Marlborough Street, sharing your office with your mother and giving up cigarettes each New Year, were the new God, the manager of the Gideon Bible."
"Awake, I memorized dreams. Dreams came into the ring like third string fighters, each one a bad bet who might win because there was no other."
"O my hunger! My hunger! I collapsed in the old-fashioned swoon between the illegally parked cars."
"You taught me to believe in dreams; thus I was the dredger."
"I have come back but disorder is not what it was. I have lost the trick of it! The innocence of it!"
"I am the child I was, living the life that was mine. I am young and half asleep. It is a time of water, a time of trees."
"Your last book unsung, your last hard words unknown, abandoned by science, cancer blossomed in your throat."
"I see leaves—leaves that are washed and innocent, leaves that never knew a cellar, born in their own green blood like the hands of mermaids."
"I was the daughter. Whiskey fortified my father in the next room. He outlasted the weather, counted his booty and brought his ship into port."
"I have misplaced the Van Allen belt, the sewers and the drainage, the urban renewal and the suburban centers. I have forgotten the names of the literary critics."
"I am black and I am beautiful. I’ve been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I’m all one skin like a fish."
"O Mary, fragile mother, hear me, hear me now although I do not know your words."
"The black rosary with its silver Christ lies unblessed in my hand for I am the unbeliever."
"The glass rises on its own toward my mouth and I notice this and understand this only because it has happened."
"But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build."
"I sit in an old lady’s room where families used to feast where the wind blows in like soot from north-northeast."
"When he died everyone was mean. Later on he rose when no one else was looking."
"Sweet weight, in celebration of the woman I am and of the soul of the woman I am and of the central creature and its delight I sing for you."
"The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light."
"The love of the woman is in the song. I called her the woman in red. I called her the girl in pink but she was ten colors and ten women."
"You say my heart is sick unto. You ought to have more respect!"
"It is snowing and death bugs me as stubborn as insomnia."
"My Sweeney, Mr. Eliot, is that Australian who came to the U.S.A. with one thought—My books in the satchel, my name."
"Linda, you are leaving your old body now. It lies flat, an old butterfly, all arm, all leg, all wing, loose as an old dress."
"There will be mud on the carpet tonight and blood in the gravy as well."
"We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death."
"The wifebeater is out, the childbeater is out eating soil and drinking bullets from a cup."
"Yesterday he built me a country and laid out a shadow where I could sleep."
"The bomb opens like a shoebox. And the child? The child is certainly not yawning."
"The king ordered every spinning wheel exterminated and exorcized. Briar Rose grew to be a goddess."
"Once there was blood as in a murder but now there is nothing."
"I have given away my leg to be brought up beside orphans."
"I want to hold it at noon in my bed and stroke it slowly like a perfect woman."
"You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place."
"I wanted only to watch her quietly as she worked."
"With this man I take in hand his destiny."
"Give me a report on the condition of my soul."
"Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through."
"I am a digger, I am not an idler, am I?"
"I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams."
"Father, the Santa Claus suit you bought is dead."
"He was beating me on the buttocks with a jump rope."
"I see him standing on the snowbank on Christmas Eve."
"Angel of clean sheets, do you know bedbugs?"
"Angel of flight and sleigh bells, do you know paralysis?"
"Angel of hope and calendars, do you know despair?"
"Angel of blizzards and blackouts, do you know raspberries?"
"Angel of beach houses and picnics, do you know solitaire?"
"Princess of the artichokes, my dickeybird, my dolly mop."
"And stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands."
"From the sea came a hand, ignorant as a penny, troubled with the salt of its mother."
"I see them roaming the streets: Levi complaining about his mattress, Sarah studying a beetle."
"Unwind, hands, you angel webs, unwind like the coil of a jumping jack."
"The objects keep changing. Ashtrays to cry into, the suffering brother of the wood walls."
"The books, each a contestant in a beauty contest, the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde."
"The sockets on the wall waiting like a cave of bees, the gold rug a conversation of heels and toes."
"The suffering brother of the wood walls, the forty-eight keys of the typewriter each an eyeball that is never shut."
"My shoes turn up like a jester’s. Clumps of my hair, as I write this, curl up individually like toes."
"I am shoveling the children out, scoop after scoop. Only my books anoint me, and a few friends."
"I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her."
"The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk."
"Your courage was a small coal that you kept swallowing."
"Floor six thousand: the stars, skeletons on fire, their arms singing."
"The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death."
"The earth falls down if I could blame it all on the weather."
"I feed the world in here too, offering the desk puppy biscuits."
"Anger, as black as a hook, overtakes me. Each day, each Nazi took, at 8:00 A.M., a baby."
"Man is a flower that should be burnt, I say aloud. Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud."
"An expensive thing it was to keep going. It gave back too. Don’t deny it!"
"The only cure for such confessions overheard was to sit in a cold bath for six days, a bath full of leeches."
"The earth without which there is no father, no flowers that grow out of rock."
"You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit."
"The sun of this month cures all. Therefore, old women say: Let the sun of March shine on my daughter."
"Put seven bowls of salt on the roof overnight and the next morning the damp one will foretell the month of rain."
"The grape is the blood of God. Watch out when holding a knife or you will behead St. John the Baptist."
"Do not sweep the house for three days or the rest of you will go. Also do not step on a boy’s head."
"Beware of tall people, they will go mad. Don’t harm the turtle dove because he is a great shoe."
"On December fourth water spurts out of the mouse. Put herbs in its eyes and boil corn."
"The state Capitol of Boston has a gold dome. During the War, they painted out the gold."
"God lives in shit—I have been told. I believe both. Is it true? Is it true?"
"Bless also the skillet, black and oil-soaked, that fries eggs like the eyes of saints."
"The sun is black mud. The moon becomes a blood ball. If religion were a dream, someone said, then it were still a dream worth dreaming."
"I dreamt of a seal with wide wings, made of vinegar and little boys, sailing past the star motes."
"A freak but moist flower tangles my lungs, knits into my heart, crawls up my throat and sucks like octopi on my tongue."
"I dance in circles holding the moth of the marriage, thin, sticky, fluttering its skirts, its webs."
"The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart."
"The earth with its little sleepy caves, its bird resting at the kitchen window, even its murders lined up like broken chairs."
"The priest came, he said God was even in Hitler. I did not believe him for if God were in Hitler then God would be in me."
"I drank their acid and concealed it. Later, if you faced the death of bombs and bullets you did not do it with a banner."
"The love that said forever, forever and then runs you over like a truck."