Tracy K. Smith > Quotes

“everything/ that ever was still is, somewhere”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“listen: the dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
marbled with static like gristly meat. a chorus of engines churns.

silence taunts: a dare. everything that disappears
disappears as if returning somewhere.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question

“Once upon a time, a woman told this to her daughter: Save yourself. The girl didn’t think to ask for what? She looked into her mother’s face and answered Yes. Years later, alone in the room where she lives The daughter listens to the life she’s been saved from: Evening patter. Summer laughter. Young bodies Racing into the unmitigated happiness of danger.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Wasn’t it strange that a poem, written in my vocabulary and as a result of my own thoughts or observations, could, when it was finished, manage to show me something I hadn’t already known? Sometimes, when I tried very hard to listen to what the poem I was writing was trying to tell me, I felt the way I imagined godly people felt when they were trying to discern God’s will. “Write this,” the poem would sometimes consent to say, and I’d revel in a joy to rival the saints’ that Poetry—this mysterious presence I talked about and professed belief in—might truly be real.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light: A memoir

“When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“some like to imagine
a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

mouthing 'yes, yes' as we toddle towards the light,
biting her lip of we teeter at some ledge. longing
to sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“time never stops, but does it end? and how many lives
before take-off, before we find ourselves
beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Look, I want to say,
The worst thing you can imagine has already
Zipped up its coat and is heading back
Up the road to wherever it came from.”
― Tracy K. Smith

“sometimes, what i see is a library in a rural community.
all the tall shelves in the big open room. and the pencils
in a cup at circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

the books have lived here all along, belonging
for weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

a pair of eyes. the most remarkable lies.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“The Weather In Space

Is God being pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we're certain to lose, so alive ---
Faces radiant with panic.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“It used to be, you’d open your mouth
And the weather changed. You’d
Open your mouth and the sky’d spill

That dry, missing-someone kind of rain
No matter the season. And it hurt
Like a guitar hurts under the right hands.

Like a good strong spell. Now
You’re all song. Body gone to memory.
And guess what? It hurts

Harder.”
― Tracy K. Smith

“I shut my ears, averted my eyes, turning instead to what I thought at the time was pain's antidote: silence. I was wrong... Silence feeds pain, allows it to fester and thrive. What starves pain, what forces it to release its grip, is speech, the voice upon which rides the story, this is what happened; this is what I have refused to let claim me.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light

“History is a ship forever setting sail.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water: Poems

“[...] the body is what we lean toward,
tensing as it darts, dancing away.
but it's the voice that enters us. even
saying nothing. even saying nothing
over and over absently to itself”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive.”
― Tracy K. Smith, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time

“Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?”
― Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water: Poems

“from time to time, i think of him watching me
from over the top of his glasses, or eating candy

from a jar. i remember thanking him each time
the session was done. but mostly what i see
is a human hand reaching down to lift
a pebble from my tongue”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Like a god, / I believe in nothing.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Duende

“the hours
plink past like water from a window a/c. we sweat it out,
teach ourselves to wait. silently, lazily, collapse happens.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“We saw to the edge of all there is -

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Old loves turn up in dreams, still livid at every slight.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“I didn't want to wait on my knees
In a room made quiet by waiting.

A room where we'd listen for the rise
Of breath, the burble in his throat.

I didn't want the orchids or the trays
Of food meant to fortify that silence,

Or to pray for him to stay or to go then
Finally toward that ecstatic light.

I didn't want to believe
What we believe in those rooms:

That we are blessed, letting go,
Letting someone, anyone,

Drag open the drapes and heave us
Back into our blinding, bright lives.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.”
― Tracy K. Smith

“I am you, one day out of five,
Tired, empty, hating what I carry
But afraid to lay it down, stingy,
Angry, doing violence to others
By the sheer freight of my gloom,
Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit
But keeping going mostly out of spite.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water: Poems

“One of poetry’s great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music and image — things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why — is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.

"Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology”
― Tracy K. Smith

“When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me"

I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed:
Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter.
Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor.
The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth
On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through
By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks
Night after night upon that room. You must have watched
For what felt like forever, wanting to be
What we passed back and forth between us like fire.
Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying
To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.
From what dream of world did you wriggle free?
What soared — and what grieved — when you aimed your will
At the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“Motherland. Madre Patria. We are born of a nation, and we are shaped by its features. Whatever that nation offers — whether it’s hardship or opportunity — is our inheritance.

When we see ourselves belonging wholly to our nation, it can be difficult to decipher its flaws and shortcomings. We make excuses for its failures and contradictions, just as family members sometimes cover for one another. It’s a form of denial.

Conversely, when your own nation lets you down, when it leaves you vulnerable, when it fails to make good on the promises of citizenship, the sense of betrayal you’re left with is nothing short of traumatic.”
― Tracy K. Smith

“This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else's unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.”
― Tracy K. Smith, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time