Mark Strand

No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at least to ourselves.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Had we not taken his place.

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzleOf light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changesWrought therein, just as our waywardness meansNothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,And so many people we loved have gone,And no voice comes from outer space, from the foldsOf dust and carpets of wind to tell us that thisIs the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knewHow long the ruins would last we would never complain.

There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

...Then a man turnedAnd said to me: "Although I love the past, the dark of it,The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the allOf it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more...

It came to my house.It sat on my shoulders.Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.

The future is always beginning now.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

It's very hard to write humor.

We__e only here for a short while. And I think it__ such a lucky accident, having been born, that we__e almost obliged to pay attention.

There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

The HillI have come this far on my own legs,missing the bus, missing taxis,climbing always. One foot in front of the other,that is the way I do it.It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on.Grass beside the road, a tree rattlingits black leaves. So what?The longer I walk, the farther I am from everything.One foot in front of the other. The hours pass.One foot in front of the other. The years pass.The colors of arrival fade.That is the way I do it.

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's allThere was to it.

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.

When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.