Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending.Indeed, there are infinite endings.Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings.
I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.
It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
A word drops into the mistlike a child’s ball into high grasswhere it remains seductivelyflashing and glinting untilthe gold bursts are revealed to besimply field buttercups.Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.
We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory
It is very difficult to win. It’s not in my script.
I am tired of having handsshe saidI want wings —But what will you do without your handsto be human?I am tired of humanshe saidI want to live on the sun —
You’re not a creature in body.You exist as the stars exist,participating in their stillness, their immensity.
You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confrontmuch sorrow and disappointment.He gazed at me with increasing frankness.I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.
Once I could imagine my soulI could imagine my death.When I imagined my deathmy soul died. ThisI remember clearly.My body persisted.Not thrived, but persisted.Why I do not know.
Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.