I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end...
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:It is what you fear.I do not fear it: I have been there.--From the poem Elm, written 19 April 1962
I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn't hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants...
I didn't know shorthand either.This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be somet...
I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself...
I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day, spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. I want, I think, to be...
For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
Eternity bores me,I never wanted it.From the poem Years, 16 November 1962
Blameless as daylight I stood lookingAt a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,Tails streaming against the greenBackdrop of sycamores. Sun was strikingWhite chapel pinnacles over the roofs,Holding...
At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.
And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and...
Although, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burni...
All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate ev...
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and...
Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting...
It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain … remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted. Wh...
In this particular tub, two knees jut uplike icebergs, while minute brown hairs riseon arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soapnavigates the tidal slosh of seasbreaking on legendary beaches; in f...
I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.