THE LOST PILOT (1967):
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law
against Henry.
– Mr. Bones: there is.
- John Berryman
NOTES OF WOE (1968):
“Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow,
They cloth’d me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.”
- William Blake
SHEPHERDS OF THE MIST (1969):
thus through life I drag
a million enormous pure loves
and a million million dirty little lovelets.
-Mayakovsky
ROW WITH YOUR HAIR (1969):
Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
-Albert Camus, The Plague
HINTS TO PILGRIMS (1971):
Solitude, my mother, tell me my life again.
-O.V. de Milosz
I bring you some water lost in your memory—
follow me to the spring and find its secret.
-Patrice de la Tour du Pin
RIVEN DOGGERIES (1979):
Friendship agony! words came to me
at last shyly. My only final friends—
the wren and thrush, made solid print for me
across dawn’s broken arc. No; yes . . . or were they
the audible ransom, ensign of my faith
towards something far, now father than ever away?
-Hart Crane
CONSTANT DEFENDER (1983):
And this is why the ingratiating smiles and gestures
of dusky fisherwomen, selling bundles of fish to
wandering comedians, seems so futile. All that world
has been condemned and forgotten a long time ago.
-Bruno Schulz
And ever from the underground egg, a birlier bird hatches and soars into the sky
-Attila József
I cannot tell if it is the end of the day or of the world, or the secret of secrets is in me again.
-Anna Akmatova
RECKONER (1986):
Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
It is to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard the truth? The the.
-Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump”
There’s no care except hunger
No favors but from an enemy
Nothing edible but a bale of hay
No lookout but there’s a man asleep
No clemency without a crime
No safety but among the frightened
No good faith but a disbeliever’s
Nor any cool heads but lovers.
-François Villon, “Ballade”
DISTANCE FROM LOVED ONES (1990):
Instead of learning to live
a loving life,
people learn how to fly.
They fly very badly,
but they stop learning
to live lovingly in order
to learn how to fly
after a fashion.
It is just as if
birds stopped flying
and tried learning to run
or build bicycles
and ride on them.
-Leo Tolstoy, Diary for Myself Alone
If you look a dog
in the eye
too intently,
it may recite
an astounding poem
to you.
-Jean Genet, Funeral Rites
If you are chosen
town clerk,
forsooth, you cannot go to
Tierra del Fuego
this summer:
but you may go
to the land of infernal fire
nonetheless.
-Henry Thoreau
WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF FLETCHERS (1994):
I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me.
He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none.
-Emily Dickinson
SHROUD OF THE GNOME (1997):
Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.
-James Salter
THE LOST EPIC OF ARTHUR DAVIDSON FICKE: The Author’s Annotations, Commentary, and Notes of Reference for A Millenium’s Teardrop by James Tate & Dara Wier (1999):
There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion. If one wishes to dispel it.
-Sören Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author
THE ROUTE AS BRIEFED (1999):
Picasso says that everything is a miracle, that it is a miracle we do not dissolve when we take a bath.
-Jean Cocteau
MEMOIR OF THE HAWK (2002):
Then I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy
RETURN TO THE CITY OF WHITE DONKEYS (2004):
The trees reflected in the river—they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near them. So are we.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks
THE GHOST SOLDIERS (2008):
The paratroopers fall and as they fall
They mow the lawn
-Wallace Stevens
THE ETERNAL ONES OF THE DREAM: SELECTED POEMS 1990-2010 (2012): no epigraph
DOME OF THE HIDDEN PAVILION (2015): no epigraph
THE GOVERNMENT LAKE (2019): no epigraph