lake linen

“If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”

“In wind-shadow, a thousand times: you.”

“All the lovely emptiness On earth is easy enough to find.”

Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me. But it is struggling too far away, to confusedly; I can just barely perceive the neutral glimmer in which the elusive eddying of stirred-up colors is blended; but I cannot distinguish the form, cannot ask it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable companion, the taste, ask it to tell me what particular circumstance is involved, what period of the past.

“Light, light! Have the stars survey me / more ardently. For I am fading.”

“How lovely that spirit, // this girl at the top, knowing no one could reach her”

“This poem works like a mesh. In it you see an eye behind bars and a glance that gets through. You look down the glance and see deeper, inside the eye, to an iris that swims there, to a splinter that smokes there, and to a conjecture (from light) of the presence of soul.”

“If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness. I would be a fox, or a tree full of waving branches.”

“If you go to an old Japanese temple, you sit on the tatami mat and look out to the garden. You see the garden framed by the projecting eaves. So these eaves can be classified as a kind of architectural element that captures external space. You feel you’re sitting inside, but at the same time you are also looking at exterior space. So, I’m interested in how to relate interior space to exterior space. There are many different ways.”

“The older I grow, the more do I love spring and spring flowers. Is it so with you?”

“The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one’s dreams, to all one’s speculations… . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm, only hastens or holds it back for a moment”

“Someday we will be more than words in the dark.”