Gathering the Fragments

Material found while sorting papers preparatory to getting serious (one more time) about my writing:

So does memory
Find you hovering
In a hundred places.
                    — Peter Davison, “Aftermath”

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
                    — Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”

Tell me what you see vanishing and I
Will tell you who you are.
                    — W.S. Merwin, “For Now”

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
                    — W.S. Merwin

How hard it is to work against silence, shame, how hard to be brave.
                            — Diana Abu-Jaber, on the writing process

Your love comes round regularly as the truck that sweeps the
streets, welcome but hardly monumental. It stirs up the
dust, it goes on its way, doing some kind of temporary good,
busy, truculent.
                            —  Marge Piercy, “The Inquisition”

There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s life fully, entirely, completely — or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
                            — Oscar Wilde

All memories are echoes: some whisper,
others roar, as this does.
                           — Grace Shulman, in a poem about W.H. Auden 
                               which appeared in The New Yorker, 1994