That night we made love “the real way” which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I’m not surewe got it...

…Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known...

THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags]Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear....

To feel anything deranges you. To be seenfeeling anything strips younaked. In the grip of itpleasure or pain doesn’tmatter. You think whatwill they do what newpower will they acquire ifthey see me naked likethis. If...

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.All mortals owe a debt to death.There’s no one alivewho can...

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then...

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

It is perilous to live past the end of your myth

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Small, red, and upright he waited,gripping his new bookbag tightin one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,while the first snows of winterfloated down on his eyelashes and covered...

Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it’s dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth–we call...

Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

DEATH. . .And now you are here to fight for this woman.You know her promise is given.She has to die or her husband won’t go free.APOLLORelax, I’m not breaking any laws.DEATHWhy the bow, if you’re...

LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean...

On the Rules of PerspectiveA bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one...

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also...

What sense is there in pain at all—however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

But when justice is done the world drops away.

What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle....

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

…And tonight—Geryon? You okay?Yes fine, I’m listening. Tonight—?Why do you have your jacket over your head?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Can’t hear...

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!

I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.