“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