I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.