“It is not our job to remain whole.We came to lose our leavesLike the trees, and be born again,Drawing up from the great roots.”

“We will have to call especially loud to reach Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.”

“Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.”

“My life failed on the very day I was born.”

“When a man says to a woman, "You are my anima," she should quickly scream and run out of the room. The word anima has neither the greatness of the Woman with Golden Hair nor the greatness of an ordinary woman, who wants to be loved as a woman.”

“THE FACE IN THE TOYOTASuppose you see a face in a ToyotaOne day, and you fall in love with that face,And it is Her, and the world rushes byLike dust blown down a Montana street.And you fall upward into some deep hole,And you can’t tell God from a grain of sand.And your life is changed, except that now youOverlook even more than you did before;And these ignored things come to bury you,And you are crushed, and your parentsCan’t help anymore, and the woman in the ToyotaBecomes a part of the world that you don’t see.And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,And you stand on some mountain road weeping.”

“BAD PEOPLEA man told me once that all the bad peopleWere needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernailsYou need; they are really claws, and we knowClaws. The sharks—what about them?They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced menIn black coats who chase you for hoursIn dreams—that’s the only way to get youTo the shore. Sometimes those hard womenWho abandon you get you to say, “You.”A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takesA lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.Then they blow across three or four States.This man told me that things work together.Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;And a careless god—who refuses to let peopleEat from the Tree of Knowledge—can leadTo books, and eventually to us. We writePoems with lies in them, but they help a little.”