When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

God is to be believed in so far as he speaks of his gun.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing

(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--

we call it life.

I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

Everything that one can tell of God or write, no less than what one can think, of God who is more than words, is as much lying as it is telling the truth.

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

It would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night,

without the terrible sex price to pay.

This is a childish idea, I know.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.

I have longed for people before, I have loved people before. Not like this. It was not this. Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Who does not end up a female impersonator?

For an instant God suspends assent and POOF! we disappear. It happens to me frequently.... Moments of death I call them.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say.

I can hear little clicks inside my dream.

Night drips its silver tap

down the back.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken.... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.

Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

All myth is an enriched pattern,

a two-faced proposition,

allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.

Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse

or so the modern experts maintain. How do people

get power over one another? is an algebraic question.

The beloved's innocence

brutalizes the lover.

As the singing of a mad person

behind you on the train

enrages you,

its beautiful

animal-like teeth

shining amid black planes

of paint.

As Helen

enrages history.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between "I love you" and "I love you too," the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

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