things I like

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
     Where I could not follow
     With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

     Never to bid good-bye
     Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,
     Unmoved, unknowing
     That your great going
Had place that moment, and altered all.

Why do you make me leave the house
And think for a breath it is you I see
At the end of the alley of bending boughs
Where so often at dusk you used to be;
     Till in darkening dankness
     The yawning blankness
Of the perspective sickens me!

     You were she who abode
     By those red-veined rocks far West,
You were the swan-necked one who rode
Along the beetling Beeny Crest,
     And, reining nigh me,
     Would muse and eye me,
While Life unrolled us its very best.

Why, then, latterly did we not speak,
Did we not think of those days long dead,
And ere your vanishing strive to seek
That time's renewal?  We might have said,
     "In this bright spring weather
     We'll visit together
Those places that once we visited."

     Well, well!  All's past amend,
     Unchangeable.  It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon. . . .  O you could not know
     That such swift fleeing
     No soul foreseeing--
Not even I--would undo me so!

“She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me.” (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

“One thing that I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.” (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

“‘I’ll give you five minutes and I’ll be back in here and you’ll wish you’d never been born.’ But I have never wished that and I wasn’t going to start wishing it for him.” (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)