Quotes from Marie Howe

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die.

Poetry is telling something to someone.

even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now she would never come into my arms without believing that I wanted something.

My soul drank enough to know how thirsty it was.

standing quietly by the window still hungry for I don't know what

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? So compact no body needed a bed, or food or money ~ no body hiding in he school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are left For every atom belong to me as good belong to you. Remember?

Sometimes, I fantasize saying to the man I married, "You know that hamburger you just gobbled down with relish and mustard? It was your truck.

Until a day came when he said, Marie, you know how we've been waiting for the big pain to come? I think it's here. I think this is it. I think it's been here all along.

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that: because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it. Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention, sister to the Sin of Omission, which was the price for what you hadn't done but thought. Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed it would start to happen; then I'd beg it to stop, and it would.

I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother's body made.

we could wake up to what we were — when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all — nothing before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness

Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed it would start to happen; then I'd beg it to stop, and it would.

Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two ines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist a metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

I am living. I remember you.

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one.

Poetry is telling something to someone.

Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost.

Sometimes I open a book that's so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can't stand it. It's like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I'm saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it.

Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story...told for the body to forget what it once loved.

A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.

Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

Soon I will die, he said, and then what everyone has been so afraid of for so long will have finally happened, and then everyone can rest.

Before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it? what once was? Before anything happen? No I, No we, No one. No way. No verb. No noun. only a tiny dot brimming with is is is is is is All everything home.