The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.