The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.