And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleep We'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.

— Mark Strand

A poem is a place where the conditions of baldness and thinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

— Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.

— Mark Strand

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

— Mark Strand

I am for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constantly themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?

— Mark Strand

In a field am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I AMI am what is missing.

— Mark Strand

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

— Mark Strand

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. Furthermore, I give it back.

— Mark Strand

It's very hard to write humor.

— Mark Strand

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our times becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means Nothing 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 folds Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that thesis the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

— Mark Strand