No one’s despair is like my despai… You have no place in this garden thinking such things, producing the tiresome outward signs; the ma… pointedly weeding an entire forest…

How can you say earth should give me joy? Each th… born is my burden; I cannot succee… with all of you. And you would like to dictate to m…

As a man and woman make a garden between them like a bed of stars, here they linger in the summer evening and the evening turns

A child draws the outline of a bod… She draws what she can, but it is… she cannot fill in what she knows… Within the unsupported line, she k… that life is missing; she has cut

There was an apple tree in the yar… this would have been forty years ago—behind, only meadows. Drifts of crocus in the damp grass.

I regret bitterly The years of loving you in both Your presence and absence, regret The law, the vocation That forbid me to keep you, the se…

Do you know what I was, how I liv… what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you… I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t exp…

You want to know how I spend my t… I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pu… clumps of clover from the flower b…

Now, in twilight, on the palace st… the king asks forgiveness of his l… He is not duplicitous; he has tried to be true to the moment; is there anoth…

Late December: my father and I are going to New York, to the cir… He holds me on his shoulders in the bitter win… scraps of white paper

One summer she goes into the field… stopping for a bit at the pool whe… looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She se… the same person, the horrible mant…