“A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.”

“...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.”

“I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.”

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,waiting for our call. We have need for them.They represent the wisdom of our race.”

“In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.”

“TransformationsAll night he ran, his body air, But that was in another year. Lately the answered shape of his laughter, The shape of his smallest word, is fire. He who is a fierce young crier Of poems will be as tranquil as water, Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure Image of limitless desire; Then enter earth and come to be, Inch by inch, geography.”

“The LayersI have walked through many lives,some of them my own,and I am not who I was,though some principle of beingabides, from which I strugglenot to stray.When I look behind,as I am compelled to lookbefore I can gather strengthto proceed on my journey,I see the milestones dwindlingtoward the horizonand the slow fires trailingfrom the abandoned camp-sites,over which scavenger angelswheel on heavy wings.Oh, I have made myself a tribeout of my true affections,and my tribe is scattered!How shall the heart be reconciledto its feast of losses?In a rising windthe manic dust of my friends,those who fell along the way,bitterly stings my face.Yet I turn, I turn,exulting somewhat,with my will intact to gowherever I need to go,and every stone on the roadprecious to me.In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.”