David Ignatow > Quotes

“I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.”
― David Ignatow

“There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.”
― David Ignatow

“The fear of being vulnerable prompts me into bringing myself forward.”
― David Ignatow

“Standing beside you,
I took an oath
to make your life simpler
by complicating mine
and what I always thought
would happen did:
I was lifted up in joy.”
― David Ignatow

“I am dreaming of the funeral of the world, watching it go by carried in an urn reduced to ashes and followed by a horde of mourners, a million abreast, across the broadest lands and all chanting together: We are dead, we have killed ourselves. We are beyond rescue. What you see is not us but your thoughts of us, and I who am observing in terror of it being true hope not to have to wake up, so that I may let myself discount it as a dream.”
― David Ignatow, Tread the dark: New poems

“Three in Translation]"

for WCW

I wish I understood the beauty
in leaves falling. To whom
are we beautiful
as we go?

I lie in the field
still, absorbing the stars
and silently throwing off
their presence. Silently
I breathe and die
by turns.

He was ripe
and fell to the ground
from a bough
out where the wind
is free
of the branches”
― David Ignatow, Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994