hold my gaze

“I don’t understand death, but I’m not afraid of dying. It will be a rest: a cradle at last. I won’t hurry it though; I will live until the last bitter drop.”

“You don’t know my life in its personal aspect. And you will never know it from my letters. I am afraid to speak out, afraid to cast an evil spell, afraid of intrusion, of ingratitude–I can’t explain it. But evidently this blessed lack of freedom is so contrary to my nature that to preserve myself I keep moving into freedom–complete freedom.”

“I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.”