You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

The early dew - falls that did a pristine coating, over the woods with its finest transparency, glazed as like its wet white - glassy earrings that hung on the ears of wild flowers - unlatched my...

She had just enough madness to make her interesting

True love is like little roses, sweet, fragrant in small doses.

What he did to my heart was sheer, inexplicable, magic.

Who can prophesy peace, or vow Futurity for any but armed insects

..Moloch who entered my soul early. Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body. Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy. Moloch whom I abandon. Wake up in Moloch.. Light streaming...

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses...

"The Apache don't have a word for love," he said. "Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw - taking ceremony?" "Tell me." "Varlebena. It means forever. That's all they say."

She kissed her as if she had been stranded on an island, marking each lonely day on a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem...

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

I saw a dog pursuing automobiles; On and on he sped. I was puzzled by this; I accosted the dog. 'If you catch one,' I said 'What will you do with it?' 'Dumb cat,' he cried, And ran on.

I am moved by fancies that are curled around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve...

The hundred lovers sleep forever beneath the dry earth. Andalusia has long red roads. Córdoba, green olive trees where to place a hundred crosses, that they remember them.

I. At tea, the kettle descants in a cozy drone, And the young wife looks in her husband's face, And then in her guest's, and shows in her own Her sense that she fills an envied place; And the visiting...

The sky drops silver threads of sleet.

… the air is a library and a phonograph record of all lived life, of every spoken phrase, and in it, all words ever spoken still resonate.

She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.

Losing through you what seemed myself, I find myself unimaginably mine, beyond sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears. Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: yours is the darkness of my...

here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide and this is the wonder that's keeping the...

Dawn unlocked the morning in increments of gray.

Dappled sunshine shivers.

I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.

Love is universal migraine, A bright stain on the vision Blotting out reason. Symptoms of true love Are leanness, jealousy, Laggard dawns; Are omens and nightmares - Listening for a knock, Waiting for...

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

Swifter far than summer's flight, Swifter far than youth's delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the...

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

The night seems more temporary than the day, especially to lovers, and it also seems more uncertain. In this way it sums up our lives, which are uncertain and temporary. We forget about that in the...

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.