“I feel as if I start in a kind of wilderness, and I’m sort of making a way, a crossable path through it. Eventually I can realize where a poem came from—but that’s rarely what the poem is about.”

“One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?”

To look at them, you might not think the two men, having spoken briefly 
                and now moving away from each other, as different goals 
                require, have much history, if any, 

                If done steadily, and with the kind of patience that belies all fear, 
it is indeed possible to walk the plank backward from the doom 
of vanishing

You lived here once. City—remember?—
of formerly your own, of the forever beloved,
of the dead,

The barn is warm, come inside, lie down,
sleep. Here, no sheep ever fails

Naturally, the preference is for
victory, not persistence
which, like fire if not put out,

There are certain words—ecstasy, abandon,
surrender—we can wait all our lives,
sometimes,

If, in depicting the angels, I cannot
avoid something, as well, of what
the river that day cast before me,
the musculature of the rowers’ arms,

"As long as I struggle to float above the ground / and fail, there is reason for this poetry."