“Al come on. The woman's, like, senile,' I said under my breath. 'Last year she thought me and Hammond were a closeted couple.”

“She opened my closet door just the tiniest crack. So I could breathe.”

“With my first & last breath thought of minds soul I will have faith in me.”

“MY WOMAN My woman came with me as far as Brest,she got off the train and stayed on the platform,she grew smaller and smaller,she became a kernel of wheat in the infinite blue,then all I could see were the tracks. Then she called out from Poland, but I couldn't answer,I couldn't ask, "Where are you, my rose, where are you?""Come," she said, but I couldn't reach her,the train was going like it would never stop,I was choking with grief. Then patches of snow were rotting on sandy earth,and suddenly I knew my woman was watching :"Did you forget me," she asked, "did you forget me?"Spring marched with muddy bare feet on the sky. Then stars lighted on the telegraph wires,darkness dashed the train like rain,my woman stood under the telegraph poles,her heart pounding as if she were in my arms,the poles kept disappearing, she didn't move,the train was going like it would never stop,I was choking with grief. Then suddenly I knew I'd been on that train for years- I'm still amazed at how or why I knew it -and always singing the same great song of hope,I'm forever leaving the cities and women I love,and carrying my losses like wounds opening inside me,I'm getting closer, closer to somewhere.”

“Submit to me."So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.”

“Hey, it could be worse," Hammond said of their efforts to protect the woodpecker. "It could be a butterfly." Butterflies were easy, I said. I would soon go to see a couple of clam species that the governor of Georgia had accused of endangering the lives of his state's children. Matteson laughed, "Woodpeckers are pretty, but mussels?" And so it goes.”