“Tears flashed into her eyes. "That's very dear of you. It's sweet to be remembered when one is away." In her voice there was the heart-breaking sweetness one sometimes hears in lovely, gentle old songs.”
Source: A Lost Lady
“The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.”
Source: Incarnadine: Poems
“Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?”
Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
“Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), a Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher said, ‘The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regrets over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“I find myself still softly searching for my delinquent palaces.”
“If strength is love, then we weren't strong enough,
But if strength is letting love go, we were.”
Source: The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990
“We're always drawn to the clearest articulation of what we think we lack.”
Source: No One Tells You This
“What are you prepared to give for your dream? If it is not everything...stop pipe dreaming.”
Source: From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence
“And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I, too, was lost—
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.”
Source: The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990
“Compromised by longing & looking for language
to note the differences in the map: the pointed spruces
tipped against the moon this time
& the water halflit, star-slid—but it makes no difference
in the telling.”
Source: Brute: Poems