“Human beings are unhappily part of nature, perhaps nature become conscious of itself . . . I love Nietzsche, who called man ‘the sick animal.’”

One evening beside the river, only its name. Only one river, the Ohio, that is the loneliest river in the world.

 

The loneliness I felt for you and the loneliness
You felt for me
Was hideous, it was the true hell of love.

   I can’t write a damned thing, which was all I wanted to do.
   And all I wanted to do was write something that you could
understand.

 I love the egg.
  I even love my poor, thick, mysterious skull.

  Mario for mayor of me, and my glorious city.
  The Mayor of New York should be a nightingale.

  Jane Lee told me that in Maine she met a little boy who
insisted that in his family they had green blood in their veins.

I keep a blue bottle.
Inside it an ear and a portrait.
When the night dominates

Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated
with fog and rain. What streets were those?
The garments of 1921 were breeding

Brooming the streets, sick drunk he hated life.
Winter after winter, his whining wife
Forgave him about midnight, and then she prayed,

I can still hear her.
She hobbles downstairs to the kitchen.
She is swearing at the dishes.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

He sits before me now, reptilian, cold,
Worn skeletal with sorrow for his child.
He would have lied to her, were he not old

The movement of my body when I wake,
Hinge of my arm, the shift of hand and throat,
Reminds me there was something for your sake

After the winter thawed away, I rose,
Remembering what you said. Below the field 
Where I was dead, the crinkled leaf and blade 

Long I have seen those eyes,
Alert, astonished, bright,
Turn softly and survey

Lured by the wall, and drawn
To stare below the roof,
Where pigeons nest aloof

James Wright answered a fan letter with the story of how he’d cheered up a lonely poet (Bill Knott, no less): with bananas. Lots of them.

Everything I love is young. I love you, because you are young. Satire, Epistle, the glistening inner wing of a redwing blackbird’s wing, you too are young.

I am dying young. Horace, young lover of old words, young new faces, I love you best.