volatile phrases

“Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.”

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.

That’s all I can do. I’ll keep at it and hope it gets better.

“Unbody me–I’m tired–and get me home.”

“I leave the house, I walk the streets, get melancholy, and come home again,”

I’ve been taking long walks in the woods on my own,

“I am gathering skies like a madwoman–”

because you are never satisfied I swallow my own grief eat yours whole

“The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.”

“To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers”

“Am I in love?—yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

“I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life.”

“This place [this landscape] has become the form of my work, its discipline, in the same way the sonnet has been the form and discipline of the work of other poets: if it doesn’t fit it’s not true.”

“I am alone. I am nothing but a faint noise. I have several noises inside me.”

“It’s true I made a feast of my own misery I invited everyone the whole gang / We ate only flowers it was my misery after all”

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing”