“We are all old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.”

“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.”

“If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.”

“We are poor passing facts.warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name.”

“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.”