“like a note of music, you are about to become nothing”

“I want nothing from You but to see You.”

“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.”

“horrible types, specialists in the One, builders of middle-class castles, and upper-class Usher houses, writers of boring Commencement speeches, creepy otherworldly types, worse than Pope Paul, academics who resembled gray jars, and who would ruin a whole state like Tennessee if put into it; people totally unable to merge into the place where they live -- they could live in a valley for years and never become the valley”

“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.”

“IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE INI have been thinking about the man who gives in.Have you heard about him? In this storyA twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small windAnd the pine bends all the way over to the ground.I was persuaded,” the pine says. “It was convincing.”A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agreesTo drown all her children. “What could I do?”The cat said. “The mouse needed that.”It’s strange. I’ve heard that some people conspireIn their own ruin. A fool says, “You don’tDeserve to live.” The man says, “I’ll string this ropeOver that branch, maybe you can find a box.”The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,I need twenty thousand corpses.” “Tell you what,”The General says, “we have an extra battalionOver there on the hill. We don’t need all these men.”

“They wrote to me and said something about it, and I said that if it doesn't involve any work, I'll do it. (On being named Minnesota's first Poet Laureate)”