Silence is the only language god speaks.

I left parts of myself everywhere,

The way absent-minded people leave

Gloves and umbrellas

Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

There’s no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any university.

Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

To be an exception to the rule is my sole ambition.

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

The stars know everything,

So we try to read their minds.

As distant as they are,

We choose to whisper in their presence.

The world dreams of you

Buttoned up to the chin

Turning on a spit

With an apple in your mouth.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

The same type of lunatics who made the world what it was when I was a kid are still around. They want more wars, more prisons, more killing. It’s all horribly familiar, very tiresome and frightening, of course.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine.

The truth is dark under your eyelids.

New York looked like painted sets in a sideshow at a carnival where the bearded lady, sword- swallowers, snake charmers, and magicians make their appearances.

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.

To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.

The coming of the inevitable,

What a strange bliss that is.

A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

For serenity you can’t beat a butterfly.

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.

When you play chess alone it's always your move.

You sit

Like a rain puddle in hell

Knitting the socks

Of your life.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

One of the distinct advantages of growing up in a place where one is apt to find men hung from lampposts as one walks to school is that it cuts down on grumbling about life as one grows older.

An insomnia as big
as the stars'
always
on the brink--
as it were
of some deeper utterance
some harsher
reckoning

Trees like country preachers

On their rostrums,

Their arms raised in blessing

Over the evening fields.

Every leaf now, every weed

Helping the night

Darken and quiet the world

For what's to come.