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1 " Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry. "
― Mark Strand , Selected Poems
2 " Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light. "
3 " When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body's been. "
4 " Lines for Winter"Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are. "
5 " Keeping Things Whole"In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body's been.We all have reasonsfor moving.I moveto keep things whole. "
6 " I grow into my death. My life is small and getting smaller. The world is green. Nothing is all. "
7 " VII"Oh you can make fun of the splendors of moonlight,But what would the human heart be if it wantedOnly the dark, wanted nothing on earthBut the sea’s ink or the rock’s black shade?On a summer night to launch yourself into the silverEmptiness of air and look over the pale fieldsAt rest under the sullen stare of the moon,And to linger in the depths of your vision and wonderHow in this whiteness what you love is pastGrief, and how in the long valley of your lookingHope grows, and there, under the distant,Barely perceptible fire of all the stars,To feel yourself wake into change, as if your changeWere immense and figured into the heavens’ longing.And yet all you want is to rise out of the shadeOf yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer nightWhen the moon shines and the earth itselfIs covered and silent in the stoniness of its sleep. "
8 " And if it happens that you cannotgo on or turn back and you find yourselfwhere you will be at the end,tell yourselfin that final flowing of cold through your limbsthat you love what you are.— Mark Strand, from “Lines for Winter,” Selected Poems. (Knopf September 26, 1990) "