“Above the crucifix I bent my head: The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead: And yet I bowed, yea, kissed—my lips did cling. (I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)”

“Being Dead While You’re Alive — That’s Real Death.”

5.29.2019

“When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: ‘Go for twenty minutes in a cemetery and you’ll see that, though your worry won’t disappear, you’ll almost forget about it and you’ll feel better.’ Just a few days ago I told a young woman who was suffering fearfully from an unhappy love, ‘Since you don’t live far from Montparnasse, take a walk through the cemetery, just half an hour, and you will see that your misery will appear bearable.’ In such a situation, it is much better to do that than to go to a doctor; there is no medicine that can help. To visit a cemetery in such a situation is a lesson, a lesson in wisdom! I have always practiced such methods, or recommended them, although it may not seem altogether serious, but it has been effective in every case. What can one say that is meaningful to someone in despair? Absolutely nothing, or almost nothing. My advice shows immediate result.”

“in the dark of the century you walk ahead of me animals we named books we buried still we did not know how to speak of the dead + where the river-bed turned to rot: the shape of wars where I laid you down with lichen: sentence about your dying + there were no fields you said, no expanses, only weight of skies as thunder-strike once hoar frost false meters, now fields fresh-appear yellow— where fog hangs and stanza breaks + we speak of this in poetry / we dream in diasporas we walk in these lines as, in the earth, cold ones walk and cannot find the burial grounds + somewhere some will speak these names someday some will think these words”

“On this warm July afternoon you are the one my thoughts wander to.”

“And what about me? The only thing that can be said about me is that I am breathing.”