Rae Armantrout Quotes

The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won’t.

A sense of mission lost in ink's jagged outcrops. I was trying to tell myself what I must have known before in a form I wouldn't recognize at first.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

I know you by your willingness.

When I dreamed about flying, it was as a skill I needed to regain.

Metaphor forms a crust beneath which the crevasse of each experience.

I'm composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive 'just' here.

The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy.

So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade

Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

this route is only one of several imaginary paths.

Now light sits in the chairs

We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious.

To reinvent anomalous figments.

Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arched out and downward, one 'after' another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture

Evening succeeds evening.

The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.

A receipt blown crazily across the parking lot, was, perhaps, a moth.

Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas.

The new pop song is about getting real: "You had a bad day." The camera don't lie. But they're lying to you about the camera.

Simple Complex systems can arise from simple rules. It's not that we want to survive, it's that we've been drugged and made to act as if we do while all the while the sea breaks and rolls, painlessly, under. If we're not copying it, we're lonely. Is this the knowledge that demands to be passed down? Time is made from swatches of heaven and hell. If we're not killing it, we're hungry.

As a child, I was abandoned in a story made of trees. Here’s the small gasp of this clearing come “upon” “again

Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself.

In the updraft, the particulate glitz is beside itself.

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension.

an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney.

Ends Meet 1 Could be time is practice, balance, the action executed in the mind before and after. Where does mind end? 2 We mark a break with what has come before, come through the door, down the hatch. Not a clean break exactly. 3 Our life was rehearsal, Mother almost said so that we believed we would escort her to the future where she could be happy.

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name?

The fear that all this will end." "The fear that it won't.

Not the city light. We want -the moon- The Moon none of our own doing! -RAE ARMANTROUT