“Literature is not different from life, it is part of life. And for someone like myself, The Odyssey is as much a part of nature as the Aegean.”

Snow fell all night and suddenly there was morning:
a startling vision from a familiar window,
   while yet an ordinary sight: a
         neighboring hill had become itself more

Like the old phoenix which, the more it got
Burnt up, (recycling its own stuff, no doubt,
For it did not burn down) the more it grew—

To sing old songs to little children in
A foreign language made intime thereby;
To pose a riddle, putting one more spin

Cast from a simile of Paul of Tarsus
Thence depicted as an anchor (ancora
Speme—there’s still hope—get it?) and by suchlike

Gleaming in Monday evening candlelight.
Glass and plate and conversation and good
Fortune then unacknowledged even by

Tired now, by candlelight and in the grip
Of much undoing to be done, we strip
   Away at varnish, burn old wills and deeds,

“Mère d’amour et fille de la Mer!”
Over the golden ocean waves of hair
Plunge, bright with her origin, where we

Off to the Gulf and hoping to have the time of our lives,
We found but the signs of fever there: the prostrate horizon,
Unable to drink of the distance, and only appearing at sundown,

The breaking of things can look like an origination
But then reveal itself, through lights shimmering in fragments 
Of smashed glass, as having occurred too late to have given

Once, but once, did I fail my Muse, who, lying
(Golden-shadowed shape) by the flaring candle,
Urged me upward. But there was more to dying

Ruins are what we make of them, and wrecked 
Imaginations could want to do so little 
With any real rubble. Acres of crumbled bricks,

These cliffs, how glorious, Helen! We have driven 
Along this route together often enough 
Not to have missed this spot before, or given 

The dark gray receding tide uncovers
New reaches of white sand, and underfoot 
Dry bony driftwood moves into the shade

The silly fish deceived him
As he approached the creel:
He thought the whole thing real

I once saw weeping in a wood
The bears that break the heart of God
When dusty grapes hung from the trees