“he was a gentleman on whom I built
an absolute trust.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and anyways this boy knows what's what, he can
look deep into his own heart
and tell you the nature of the human - kindness,
courtesy, force.”
“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”
“they came to these islands and low hills
which lift up from a land where we have
set a lamp with a golden torch
on top, to remind us, here at the door:
entering through it was a promise to leave it
open behind us.”
“I am falling,
and I do not feel that there are rocks, below,
I think I may go on falling, like my own
flesh, for the rest of my life”
“I guess that's how people go on, without
knowing how.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and my job is to eat the whole car
of my anger, part by part, some parts
ground down to steel-dust.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“So much had become so connected to him
that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,
flying, for hours, above the Atlantic
still felt like being over his realm.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“seeking how to accept him as
he was, under the law that he could not
speak—and when I shrieked against the law
he shrinked down into its absolute,
he rose from its departure gate.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any other, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust's affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said Good-bye”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“Sometimes
I don't see exactly how to go on doing this.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I am so ashamed
before my friends—to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“the flesh no one seems now
to care to touch.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“Have faith,
old heart. What is living, anyway,
but dying.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I had not put into
words, yet—the worst thing,
but I thought that I could say it, if I said it
word by word.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“If I ever
prayed, as a child, for everlasting
union, these were its shoes: one dew-licked
kicked-off slipper of a being now flying, one
sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead,
which I wore, as I dreamed.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“It struck cold awe to my heart,
now, to look at who I had been
who had thought it was impossible
that he or I could touch another.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“And to live in those rooms,
where one of his smiles might emerge, like something
almost from another place,
another time, another set
of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be
held in mysteriousness, and a little
in mourning.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“again,
again, unquestioned, not fully seen,
not wanting to fully see.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“We joked about putting it off, but
underneath the joking, grim
and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was
working toward it and against it, maybe worried
he could not do it, longing for it
and fearing it, and not speaking of it”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and there is
nothing to be done for it,
it can only be known and borne, it cannot be
turned into anything fruitful or sweet,
but just be faced, as what it was”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and love
seemed to rest, on us, in a place
where, for that hour, it felt death could not
reach, and someone was singing in my hearing, without
words, that no one can live without reaching
death, but I could have lived without having
loved almost without reserve, and for a
moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“And slowly he starts to seem more far
away, he seems to waft, drift
at a distance”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“If I could
choose, a place to die,”
it would never have been in your arms, old darling,
we figured I'd see you out, in mine”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“That moved me so much about you,
the way you were a dumbstruck one
and yet you seemed to know everything
I did not know”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I think he loved being loved”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“We have always been going back, since birth,
back toward not being alive.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“But if feels as if he's not here—
though he's here, it feels as if, for me,
there's no one there”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“Now I see
I've been hoping, each time we meet, that he would praise me
for how well I took it, but it's not to be.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and for an instant
he's alive toward me, a gem of sea of
pond in his eye. Then that retreat into himself,
which always moved me, as if there were
a sideways gravity, in him, toward some
vanishing point.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“And no, he does not
want to meet again, in a year—when we
part, it is with a dry bow
and Good-bye.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“And it entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard by me, untouched by me,
but known by others, seen by others,
heard, touched.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“One of us
maybe a little too much a hunter,
the other a little too polar of affection,
polar of summer mysteriousness,
magnetic in reticent mourning.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“And sometimes I feel as if,
already, I am not here—”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“but he does not want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness at the end of it.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“Before I turned out the light,
he touched my face, then turned away,
then the dark.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“where what cannot
be seen is inferred by what the visible
does.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I want to say to him, now, What
was it like, to love me—when you looked at me,
what did you see?”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“When he loved me, I looked
out at the world as if from inside
a profound dwelling, like a burrow or a well, I'd gaze
up, at noon, and see Orion
shining—when I thought he loved me, when I thought
we were joined not just for breath's time,
but for the long continuance”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“He shows no anger,
I show no anger but in flashes of humor,
all is courtesy and horror.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I still dreamed it
sometimes, the illusion of a constellation
visible only from a certain vantage”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“and it's as if my body has not
heard, or hasn't believed, the news”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“in a sky whose darkness is fading, that
first dream, from which I am now waking.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into
every reach”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“He lived
so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not
exactly like others, but hibernating”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“I called for him through solid earth
until he woke, and left.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
