Mark Strand

“Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzleOf light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changesWrought therein, just as our waywardness meansNothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,And so many people we loved have gone,And no voice comes from outer space, from the foldsOf dust and carpets of wind to tell us that thisIs the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knewHow long the ruins would last we would never complain.”

“Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.”

“Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.”

“And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.”

“I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.”

“The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.”

“A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.”

“For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.”

“These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.”

“And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.”

“The future is always beginning now.”

“And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been                    Had we not taken his place.”

“It's very hard to write humor.”

“There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.”

“When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.”

“It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.”

“What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at least to ourselves.”

“No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.”

“In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.”

“From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's allThere was to it.”