. . . You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles -- you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head -- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down. |
"It's love," they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half. |
A great snug wall goes around everything, has always been there, will always remain. It is a good world to be lost in. It comforts you. It is all right. And you sleep. |
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions . . . |
All right. I listen. My life sinks a little farther, for the pity; from now on I know it with them. We'll take a stand, wherever the end is. We go forward by this quiet sharing, they one way, I another. I am their promise: no one else is going to know. |
And all the time it's your own story, even when you think -- "It's all just made up, a trick. What is the author trying to do?" Reader, we are in such a story: all of this is trying to arrange a kind of prayer for you. Pray for me. |
And sometimes when they look in the fire they see time going on and someone alone, but they don't say anything. |
At noon in the desert a panting lizard waited for history, its elbows tense, watching the curve of a particular road as if something might happen. |
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean. |
Exactly at midnight yesterday sighs away. |
For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give -- yes or no, or maybe -- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. |
I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language. |
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. |
I embrace emerging experience.
I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly. |
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. |