“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

“Percy wakes me (fourteen)Percy wakes me and I am not ready.He has slept all night under the covers.Now he’s eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter Where he is not supposed to be. How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you Needed me, To wake me. He thought he would a lecture and deeply His eyes begin to shine.He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.He squirms and squeals: he has done something That he needed And now he hears that it is okay. I scratch his ears. I turn him over And touch him everywhere. He isWild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then He has breakfast, and he is happy.This is a poem about Percy.This is a poem about more than Percy.Think about it.”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.”

“The language of the poem is the language of particulars.”

“The god of dirtcame up to me many times and saidso many wise and delectable things, I layon the grass listeningto his dog voice,frog voice; now,he said, and now,and never once mentioned foreverfrom, One or Two Things”

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”