Donald Justice Quotes & Sayings

There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence. — Donald Justice

See how the fearful chandelier trembles above you each time you open your mouth to sing.
Sing. — Donald Justice

Donald justice:
i often wonder about the others,
where they are bound for on the voyage, what is the reason for their silence,
was there some reason to go away? — Donald Justice

How shall I speak of Doom, and ours in special, But as of something altogether common? — Donald Justice

The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait,
A revenge not only necessary but right and clever
Simply to leave him out of the scene forever. — Donald Justice

Come back now and help me with these verses. Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life. — Donald Justice

Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor of certain voids. — Donald Justice

Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago. — Donald Justice

Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to. — Donald Justice

The Thin Man
I indulge myself
In rich refusals.
Nothing suffices.
I hone myself to
This edge. Asleep, I
Am a horizon. — Donald Justice

If he could sleep on it. He would make his bed with white sheets And disappear into the white, Like a man diving, If he could be certain That the light Would not keep him awake, The light that reaches To the bottom. — Donald Justice

Soon the purple dark must bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little Cupid lose
Eyes and ears and chin and nose — Donald Justice

Poem to Be Read at 3:00 A.M.
by Donald Justice

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
at 3 A.M.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on — Donald Justice

Men at Forty"

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses. — Donald Justice

Elsewheres
South
The long green shutters are drawn.
Against what parades?
Closing our eyes against the sun,
We try to imagine
The darkness of an interior
Where something might still happen:
The razor lying open
On the cool marble washstand,
The drip of something
is it water?
Upon stone floors. — Donald Justice

Go then, O my inseperable, this once more, — Donald Justice

Waiting for dusk and someone dear to come and whip him down the street, gently home — Donald Justice