A Subtle and Exquisite Poison

Dark, with brown hair, I don’t recall. Young. Magnificent eyes that mingle languor with subtlety, cruelty, despair. Slender, dressed in dark colours, black silk stockings.

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again —

The only true courage I have is to feel everything. I do not always act or dare to live out my decisions, but I experience them emotionally to the fullest.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

…When I said I was considering something more creative, [my father] shook his head as if I’d been terribly mistaken and said there was no need for that; I was already an artist by blood; all immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form.

When the lithe moonlight silently Leaped like a satyr to the grass, Filling the night with nakedness, All silently I loved my love In gardens of white ivory

“My face is still burning from the Black Sea sun and from the summer night, from the full moon and his green eyes. I am burning like embers. I am glowing in the dark.”

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet’s life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

…the heart slips backward, remembering, remembering.