The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.

The love of form is a love of endings.

I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.

17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.