“Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.”

“They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.”

“A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.”

“your song, what does it know?Deepinsnow,Eepinow,E-i-o.”

“How you die out in me:down to the lastworn-out knot of breathyou're there, with a splinter of life.”

“Count up the almonds,Count what was bitter and kept you waking,Count me in too:I sought your eye when you glanced up and no one would see you,I spun that secret threadWhere the dew you mused onSlid down to pitchersTended by a word that reached no one’s heart.There you first fully entered the name that is yours, you stepped to yourself on steady feet,the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence,things overheard thrust through to you,what’s dead put it’s arm around you too,and the three of you walked through the evening.Render me bitter.Number me among the almonds”

“out of a shardstrewnmadnessI stand upand look upon my hand,how it draws the oneand onlycircle”