Marie Howe Quotes

I am living. I remember you.

Besides, when I look around me at the men, I feel that God never meant us women to be too particular.

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.

Poetry is telling something to someone.

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

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.

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.

It comes down to this. Some one must wash the dishes. Now, would you expect man, man made in the image of God, to roll up his sleeves and wash the dishes? Why, it would be blasphemy. I know that I am but a rib and so I wash the dishes.

Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

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.

Even If I Don’t See it Again Even if I don’t see it again.–nor ever feel it I know it is–and that if once it hailed me it ever does– and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction not as towards a place, but it was a tilting within myself, as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where it isn’t.–I was blinded like that–and swam in what shone at me only able to endure it by being no one and so specifically myself I thought I’d die from being loved like that.

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.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk down a sidewalk without looking back.

WHAT THE LIVING DO Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.

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.

the bridge appears when you walk across it—that

I called her name into the fold between night and day.

If I stopped dyeing my hair everyone would know that my golden hair is actually gray, and my long American youth would be over—and then what?

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.

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.

--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life, the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself.

Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings, someone shaking out a rug from an open window might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away and thought little or nothing of it.

Part of Eve’s Discussion It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.

What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass […] and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you. — Marie Howe, from “What the Living Do,” The Atlantic Monthly (April 1994)

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

and he: (and this was almost unbearable) he saw me see him, and I saw him see me. He said something like, You're going to be ok now, or, It's been difficult hasn't it, but what he said mattered only a little. We met — in our mutual gaze — in between a third place I'd not yet been.

This is what the living do.

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.

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.

Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

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.

Marriage My husband likes to watch the cooking shows, the building shows, the Discovery Channel, and the surgery channel. Last night he told us about a man who came into the emergency room with a bayonet stuck entirely through his skull and brain. Did they get it out? We all asked. They did. And the man was ok because the blade went exactly between the two halves without severing them. And who had shoved this bayonet into the man’s head? His wife. A strong woman, someone said. And everyone else agreed.

Government Standing next to my old friend I sense that his soldiers have retreated. And mine? They’re resting their guns on their shoulders talking quietly. I’m hungry, one says. Cheeseburger, says another, and they all decide to go and find some dinner. But the next day, negotiating the too narrow aisles of The Health and Harmony Food Store—when I say, Excuse me, to the woman and her cart of organic chicken and green grapes she pulls the cart not quite far back enough for me to pass, and a small mob in me begins picking up the fruit to throw. So many kingdoms, and in each kingdom, so many people: the disinherited son, the corrupt counselor, the courtesan, the fool. And so many gods—arguing among themselves, over toast, through the lunch salad and on into the long hours of the mild spring afternoon—I’m the god. No, I’m the god. No, I’m the god. I can hardly hear myself over their muttering. How can I discipline my army? They’re exhausted and want more money. How can I disarm when my enemy seems so intent?

When I walked across a room I saw myself walking as if I were someone else, when I picked up a fork, when I pulled off a dress, as if I were in a movie. It’s what I thought you saw when you looked at me. So when I looked at you, I didn’t see you I saw the me I thought you saw, as if I were someone else. I called that outside—watching. Well I didn’t call it anything when it happened all the time. But one morning after I stopped the pills—standing in the kitchen for one second I was inside looking out. Then I popped back outside. And saw myself looking. Would it happen again? It did, a few days later. My friend Wendy was pulling on her winter coat, standing by the kitchen door and suddenly I was inside and I saw her. I looked out from my own eyes and I saw: her eyes: blue gray transparent and inside them: Wendy herself! Then I was outside again, and Wendy was saying, Bye-bye, see you soon, as if Nothing Had Happened. She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t known that I’d Been There for Maybe 40 Seconds, and that then I was Gone. She hadn’t noticed that I Hadn’t Been There for Months, years, the entire time she’d known me. I needn’t have been embarrassed to have been there for those seconds; she had not Noticed The Difference. This happened on and off for weeks, and then I was looking at my old friend John: : suddenly I was in: and I saw him, and he: (and this was almost unbearable) he saw me see him, and I saw him see me. He said something like, You’re going to be ok now, or, It’s been difficult hasn’t it, but what he said mattered only a little. We met—in our mutual gaze—in between a third place I’d not yet been.

So who is the woman who excites Diana’s feelings? From the moment photographs of Camilla fluttered from Prince Charles’s diary during their honeymoon to the present day, the Princess of Wales has understandably harboured every kind of suspicion, resentment and jealousy about the woman Charles loved and lost during his bachelor days. Camilla is from sturdy county stock with numerous roots in the aristocracy. She is the daughter of Major Bruce Shand, a well-to-do wine merchant, Master of Fox Hounds and the Vice Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex. Her brother is the adventurer and author Mark Shand, who was once an escort of Bianca Jagger and model Marie Helvin, and is now married to Clio Goldsmith, niece of the grocery millionaire. Camilla is related to Lady Elspeth Howe, wife of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the millionaire builder, Lord Ashcombe. Her great-grandmother was Alice Keppel who for many years was the mistress of another Prince of Wales, Edward VII. She was married to a serving Army officer and once said that her job was to “curtsey first--and then leap into bed.

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.

My soul drank enough to know how thirsty it was.

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.

Singularity (after Stephen Hawking) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money— nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? There was no Nature. No them. No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French; would that 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. Can molecules recall it? what once was? before anything happened? No I, no We, no one. No was No verb no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is All everything home

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

Beside my chair, our dog’s paws drag at the sand; these are the first holes she has ever dug, and now digging is her vocation. My kids giggle at her industriousness, though it’s clear that they are ready to no longer be sandy, to return to the house for showers and games and ice cream. As they begin rolling up their towels, folding up their chairs, I pull my phone out of my pocket and search for a poem I saved long ago: “What the Living Do,” by Marie Howe. I first encountered it when I was twenty-two, an age when I’d barely known grief, and was so moved by Howe’s words that I kept the poem to reread and eventually bought all of her books. Addressed to her brother John, who died of complications from AIDS, “What the Living Do” has always seemed to me a perfect expression of love, and loss, and what it means to survive. It’s been a few years since I last thought of it, but now that I need it, it’s waiting for me, as the best poems do.

The conductor Bruno Walter comes by with some frequency. So do violinists Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz. Pianists Artur Schnabel and Moriz Rosenthal. Composers Ernest Bloch, Igor Stravinsky, Amy Beach, Mary Howe, Raimund Mandl, Ottorino Respighi and Ruth Crawford are among the names I can make out. Possibly even Charles Ives. Later, in a 1928 engagement calendar, if I am not misreading, I spot Maurice Ravel.

He had nothing against the marys – so long as they kept their mitts to themselves, which he knew wasn’t easy with a hunk of all-American beef like Shane Moxie to tempt them

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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

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling - whatever leads to joy, they always answer, to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were - it's green in there, a green vase, and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes. Billy's already gone through the frightening door, whatever he says I'll do.