Quotes from Linda Pastan

Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut.

I made a list of things I have to remember and a list of things I want to forget, but I see they are the same list.

What we want is never simple.

What We Want What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

To be the other woman is to be a season that is always about to end, when the air is flowered with jasmine and peach, and the weather day after day is flawless, and the forecast is hurricane.

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"]

Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open--that one and that--and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read--these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth.

But the constricted light, the year closing down on itself with all the vacancies of January ahead, leave me unreconciled even to beauty.] When will you be coming back?

I'm only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I'll be gone forever—- the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I'd need for an eternity of traveling light. I've left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and heating dinner. But like the weather front they warn is on its way with its switchblades of wind and ice, our lives have minds of their own.

Despite the enormous evening sky spreading over most of the canvas, its moon no more than a tarnished coin, dull and flat, in a devalued currency; despite the trees, so dark themselves, stretching upward like supplicants, utterly leafless; despite what could be a face, rinsed of feeling, aimed in their direction, the two small figures at the bottom of this picture glow bravely in their carnival clothes, as if the whole darkening world were dimming its lights for a party.

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?" Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed. Linda Pastan, Poetry (August 2003

But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if it were the first— all raw astonishment . . .