“Chipmunks jump, andgreensnakes slither.Rather burst thannot be with her.Bluebirds fight, butbears are stronger.We've got fifty years or longer.Hoptoads hop, buthogs are fatter.Nothing else butUs can matter.”

“When I was nineteen,I told a thirty-year-old man what afool I had been whenI was seventeen.'We were always,' hesaid glancing down, 'afool two years ago.”

“[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.”

“We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.”

“Ox Cart ManIn October of the year,he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,counting the seed, countingthe cellar's portion out,and bags the rest on the cart's floor.He packs wool sheared in April, honeyin combs, linen, leathertanned from deerhide,and vinegar in a barrelhoped by hand at the forge's fire.He walks by his ox's head, ten daysto Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,and the bag that carried potatoes,flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goosefeathers, yarn.When the cart is empty he sells the cart.When the cart is sold he sells the ox,harness and yoke, and walkshome, his pockets heavywith the year's coin for salt and taxes,and at home by fire's light in November coldstitches new harnessfor next year's ox in the barn,and carves the yoke, and saws planksbuilding the cart again.”

“Exiled by death from people we have known,We are reduced again by years, and tryTo call them back and clothe the barren bone,Not to admit that people ever die.-from "Exile”

“The tree is burning on the autumn noonThat builds each year the leaf and bark again.Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,The rounding season will restore and mend.Yet people are not mended, but go on,Accumulating memory and love.And so the wood we used to know is gone,Because the years have taught us that we move.We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,To different Asias of our plundering.And though we sorrow not to know againA land or face we loved, yet we are king.The young are never robbed of innocenceBut given gold of love and memory.We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,And when we die are full of memory.-from "September Ode”