“...may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy”

“It may not be written in any book, but it is written—You can’t go back,you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.”

“What makes us leave what we love best?What is it inside us that keeps erasing itselfWhen we need it most,That sends us into uncertainty for its own sakeAnd holds us flush there until we begin to love itAnd have to begin again?What is it within our own lives we decline to liveWhenever we find it, making our days unendurable,And nights almost visionless?I still don't know yet, but I do it.”

“ToadstoolsThe toadstools are starting to comeup, circular and dry.Nothing will touch them,Gophers or chipmunks, wasps or swallows.They glow in the twilight like rooted will-o’-the-wisps.Nothing will touch them.As though little roundabouts from the bunched unburiable,Powers, dominions,As though orphans rode herd in the short grass, as though they had heard the call,They will always be with us, transcenders of the world.Someone will try to stick his beak into their otherworldly styrofoam.Someone may try to taste a taste of forever.For some it’s a refuge, for some a shady place to fall down.Grief is a floating barge-boat, who knows where it’s going to moor?”

“Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What’sToCome.”

“How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
                                                         floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
                                                        with no ripple, without us in it.”

“Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.Morning arrives and that's it.Sunlight darkens the earth.”