Quotes from Robert Lowell

It has taken me the time since you diedto discover you are as human as I am…if I am.

Father, forgive memy injuries,as I forgivethose Ihave injured!You never climbedMount Sion, yet leftdinosaurdeath-steps on the crust,where I must walk.

on Boylston Street, a commercial photographshows Hiroshima boiling.

I will catch Christ with a greased worm.

When I crouch to my television set,the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

I keep no rank nor station.Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

We feel the machine slipping from our handsas if someone else were steering;if we see the light at the end of the tunnel,it's the light of the oncoming train.

Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gentle tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.

Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,must lay his heart out for my bed and board.

This is the Black Widow, death.

Dearest, I cannot loiter here in lather like a polar bear.

The slick bare tar, the same suburban station.

The twinkling steel above me is a star; I am a fallen Christmas tree. Our car Races through seven red-lights—then the road Is unpatrolled and empty, and a load Of ply-wood with a tail-light makes us slow. I turn and whisper in her ear. You know I want to leave my mother and my wife, You wouldn't have me tied to them for life Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Time runs, the windshield runs with stars.

Oh to break loose like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall.... Time to grub up and junk the year's output, a dead wood of dry verse: dim confession, coy revelation, liftings, listless self-imitation, whole days when I could hardly speak, came pluming home unshaven, weak and willing to read anyone things done before and better done....

Then morning comes, saying, "This was a night.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole, his telescope, when the women's white bodies flashed in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail. Nothing! No oil for the eye, nothing to pour on those waters or flames. I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair- hanging like an oasis on his air of lost connections...

Surely the lives of the old are briefer than the young.

We wished our two souls might return like gulls to the rock. In the end, the water was too cold for us.

In it, he pushed the metric of typewriter spaces, and quoted from a poem, "The Catholic Bells," to show us Williams's "mature style at fifty"! This was a memorable phrase, and one that made maturity seem possible, but a long way off. I more or less memorized "The Catholic Bells," and spent months trying to console myself by detecting immaturities in whatever Williams had written before he was fifty.

you trip and lance Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping The jellied iridescence of the crab.

Why do we hunger so for vicious things? Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.

Yet why not say what happened?

That was the first growth, the heir of all my minutes, the victim of every ramification- more and more it grew green, and gave too much shelter. And now at my homecoming, the barked elms stand up like sticks along the street. I am a foot taller than when I left, and cannot see the dirt at my feet. Yet sometimes I catch my vague mind circling with a glazed eye for a name without a face, or a face without a name, and at every step, I startle them. They start up, dog-eared, bald as baby birds.