Diane Wakoski > Quotes

“Sour Milk

You can't make it
turn sweet
again.
Once
it was an innocent color
like the flowers of wild strawberries,
and its texture was simple
would pass through a clean cheesecloth,
its taste was fresh.
And now
with nothing more guilty that the passage of time
to chide it with,
the same substance
has turned sour and lumpy.

The sour milk
makes interesting & delicious doughs,
can be carried to a further state of bacterial action
to create new foods,
can in its own right
be considered complicated and more interesting in texture
to one who studies it closely,
like a map of the world.

But
to most of us:
it is spoiled.
Sour.
We throw it out,
down the drain-not in the backyard-
careful not to spill any
because the smell is strong.
A good cook
would be shocked
with the waste.
But we do not live in a world of good cooks.

I am the milk.
Time passes.
You cannot make it
turn sweet
again.
I sit guiltily on the refrigerator shelf
trembling with hope for a cook
who dreams of waffles,
biscuits, dumplings
and other delicious breads
fearing the modern housewife
who will lift me off the shelf and with one deft twist
of a wrist...
you know the rest.

You are the milk.
When it is your turn
remember,
there is nothing more than the passage of time
we can chide you with.”
― Diane Wakoski, Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987

“It was hard for them to accuse their wives of infidelity when their rival was an invisible man.”
― Diane Wakoski, Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands

“Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.”
― Diane Wakoski

“Uneasy Rider"

Falling in love with a mustache
is like saying
you can fall in love with
the way a man polishes his shoes
which,
of course,
is one of the things that turns on
my tuned-up engine

those trim buckled boots

(I feel like an advertisement
for men’s fashions
when I think of your ankles)

Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face

and I find myself

a bad moralist,

a failing aesthetician,

a sad poet,

wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles
that make a man’s body have so much substance,
that makes a woman
lean and yearn in that direction
that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day
in your presence
the pool of wax under a burning candle
the foam from a waterfall

You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson
She is the rain,
waits in it for you,
finds blood spotting her legs
from the long ride.”
― Diane Wakoski

“If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those
black serpents in the pit of my body,
that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough
butterfly wing
broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking,
if you imagine that my body is not
blackened
burned wood,
then you imagine a false woman.”
― Diane Wakoski

“Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.”
― Diane Wakoski

“I grew up
where the family of butterflies
the Silver Cloud
is native.”
― Diane Wakoski, Smudging

“Forgive me then,
if the poems I write
are about the fragments,
the broken bridges,
and unlit fences
in my life.
For the poet,
the poem
is not
the measure
of his love. It is
the measure
of all he’s lost, or
never seen,
or what has no life,
unless he gives it life
with words.

from “With Words”
― Diane Wakoski, Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987

“Women, myself, we
need to love a beast, to feel that it could transcend
itself for love, for us, for beauty.”
― Diane Wakoski, Jason the Sailor