I never had much education in English poetry as such.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.