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“Can I ask you another question? How did it start?” “How could I begin to tell you? Things like that are so long and so complicated, and sometimes I really think they are a little beyond me. It would mean going so far back that I feel tired before I start. But on the whole I think things happened to me as they do to anyone else, no differently.”

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

I held myself too open, I forgot that outside not just things exist and animals fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes reach from their lives’ roundedness no differently than portraits do from frames; forgot that I with all I did incessantly crammed looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity. Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you does my face cease being on display, grows into you and twines on darkly, endlessly, into your sheltered heart. As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath- no: as one presses it against a wound out of which the whole of life, in a single gush, wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you turn red from me. How could anyone express what took place between us? We made up for everything there was never time for. I matured strangely in every impulse of unperformed youth, and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart. Memory won’t suffice here: from those moments there must be layers of pure existence on my being’s floor, a precipitate from that immensely overfilled solution. For I don’t think back; all that I am stirs me because of you. I don’t invent you at sadly cooled-off places from which you’ve gone away; even your not being there is warm with you and more real and more than a privation. Longing leads out too often into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when, for all I know, your influence falls on me, gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Alone I know the days / Are still-born, and the world stopped, lacking you.