“Her German language made my arteries harden-I've no annuity for the play we blew.I chartered an aluminum canoe,I had her six times in the English Garden.”

“I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”

“My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,a captive as Racine, the man of craft,drawn through his maze of iron compositionby the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.When I was troubled in mind, you made for my bodycaught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself--to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.”

“History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had -it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.”

“Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise,your wandering silences and bright trouvailles,dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish...saying too little, then too much.Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them,the archetypal voices sing offkey;the old actor cannot read his friends,and nevertheless he reads himself aloud,genuis hums the auditorium dead.The line must terminate.Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetimeknotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

“I saw the sky descending, black and white,Not blue, on Boston where the winters woreThe skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates,And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers toreThe chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waitsIts victim and tonightThe worms will eat the deadwood to the footOf Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;The wild ingrafted olive and the rootAre withered, and a winter drifts to whereThe Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spansCharles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles.I saw my city in the Scales, the pansOf judgement rising and descending. PilesOf dead leaves char the air—And I am a red arrow on this graphOf Revelations. Every dove is sold.The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its holdOn serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph.In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:“Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beastWho fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.”At the high altar, goldAnd a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beatMy cheek. What can the dove of Jesus giveYou now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.”

“Epilogue Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--why are they no help to me nowI want to makesomething imagined, not recalled?I hear the noise of my own voice:The painter's vision is not a lens,it trembles to caress the light.But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eyeseems a snapshot,lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,heightened from life,yet paralyzed by fact.All's misalliance.Yet why not say what happened?Pray for the grace of accuracyVermeer gave to the sun's illuminationstealing like the tide across a mapto his girl solid with yearning.We are poor passing facts,warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name.”