“When you play chess alone it's always your move.”

“This strange thing must have crept Right out of hell.It resembles a bird’s footWorn around the cannibal’s neck.As you hold it in your hand,As you stab with it into a piece of meat,It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird: Its head which like your fistIs large, bald, beakless, and blind.”

“In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.”

“While you sitLike a rain puddle in hellKnitting the socks Of your life.”

“The truth is dark under your eyelids.What are you going to do about it?The birds are silent; there's no one to ask.All day long you'll squint at the gray sky.When the wind blows you'll shiver like straw.A meek little lamb you grew your woolTill they came after you with huge shears.Flies hovered over open mouth,Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,The bare branches reached after them in vain. Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldierOf a defeated army, you'll stay at your post,Head bared to the first snow flake.Till a neighbor comes to yell at you,You're crazier than the weather, Charlie.”

“The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine… While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you’re making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might’ve thrown them out with last spring’s cleaning. It’s snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.”

“Because the light is always with usand the hush of an early morningtime propitious to plain speechspace between the premonition and the eventthe small lovely realm of the possible.”