“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?”
There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.
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“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?”
“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 the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn b...”
“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
“[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!”
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