Mark Strand Quotes

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

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

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing,
This stomach which sags
with old food, these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way.

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time.

...Then a man turned
And said to me: "Although I love the past, the dark of it,
The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more...

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