Time and Materials Quotes

“It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials

“What would you do if you were me? she said.
If I were you-you, or if I were you-me?
If you were me-me.
If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly
what you're doing.”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials

“Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset
The rim of the sky takes on a tinge
Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber
When you peel it carefully.”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials

“After Goethe”

In all the mountains,
Stillness;
In the treetops
Not a breath of wind.
The birds are silent in the woods.
Just wait: soon enough
You will be quiet too.”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials

“The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials

“Her body by the fire
Mimicked the light-conferring midnights
Of philosophy.
Suppose they are dead now.
Isn’t “dead now” an odd expression?
The sound of the owls outside
And the wind soughing in the trees
Catches in their ears, is sent out
In scouting parties of sensation down their spines.
If you say it became language or it was nothing,
Who touched whom?
In what hurtle of starlight?
Poor language, poor theory
Of language. The shards of skull
In the Egyptian museum looked like maps of the wind-eroded
Canyon labyrinths from which,
Standing on the verge
In the yellow of a dwindling fall, you hear
Echo and re-echo the cries of terns
Fishing the worked silver of a rapids.
And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons
Had a name for it. They called it silm.
They were navigators. It was also
Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.

— Robert Hass, “Etymology.” Time and Materials. (Ecco; First Edition edition October 9, 2007)”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials