“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?”

“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.”

“..when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality”

“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.”

“I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.”

“a most excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in some places and not quite so loose in others.”

“They had pulled me from the hemorrhaging, dying body of my mother and turned me over to the care of the man who was not my father. He had taken me home to their tiny apartment above the old hardware store and done what little he knew to take care of me. It took less than six weeks for him to realize his mistake. Maybe even less than six hours, but he never abandoned me. He clung to me as though I was the last remnant of some great and powerful love. And that gave me hope that maybe my mother was really something else and not just some girl who got knocked up by a guy whose name she didn’t even know. She was something special, someone worthy of a man’s loyalty and devotion.--Rocky Evans”