“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You lie upon my heart as on a nest,Folded in peace, for you can never knowHow crushed I am with having you at restHeavy upon my life. I love you soYou bind my freedom from its rightful quest.In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.”

“Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gently tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die--when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.”