heartbreak
For a long time I have felt the tug of my soul toward you as though you must be ill or in trouble, and it has taken a great control for me not to attempt to find you. I never hear of you, and I don’t know where you are, for all I know you may be wandering in Europe again. I am not hysterical, nor suffering from any illness, I know only that I love you with undying and undefeated love. I am waiting to see your work, how much you have gained by your freedom from our separation.
Letter to Thomas Wolfe, November 16, 1932, in My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein, ed. by Suzanne Stutman (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 349.
The day is breaking someone else’s heart.
“Prism,” in James Merrill: Selected Poems 1946–1985 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 65.