“Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,I stand in the dark and answer toMy life, this shirt I want to take off,which is on fire . . .”

“The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.”

“Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.Moon-fingers lay down their same routineOn the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.I want to be bruised by God.I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.I want to be entered and picked clean.And the wind says “What?” to me.And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.And the gears notch and the engines wheel.”

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

“We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.”

“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.”

“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.”