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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”