Pub Date: February 29, 2012
40 pages
ISBN: 9781936767120

But I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel – you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety – & even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.
—Herman Melville

Susie, what shall I do – there is’nt room enough; not half enough, to hold what I was going to say. Wont you tell the man who makes sheets of paper, that I hav’nt the slightest respect for him!
—Emily Dickinson

I am the outskirts of a nonexistent town, a prolix commentary on an unwritten book. I am no one, no one. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to love. I am a character in an unwritten novel, passing by, airy and unmade, without having existed, amid the dreams of whoever it is who didn’t know how to complete me.
—Bernardo Soares to Fernando Pessoa

You can’t derange, or re-arrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.
—Elizabeth Bishop

SANS MAISONNÉE

 

The end of this poem
Is beyond me
And in this discursion
You have joined yourselves
To an old certainty:

We love each other.
Fruits swell on branches
Out of the white blossoms of your
Freckled countries

While bats flow
Into the bright failure of themselves,
Wings beating echoes
Of this poem’s lines
The tip of my tongue is tracing
On a winter windowpane.

In a new stanza
We are pared down
To the throat bone’s thrumming;
We’re in an octave people can’t sing.

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