“Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts Nor the woman in the ambulance Whore red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly....Oh my God, what am IThat these late mouths should cry openIn a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers”

“And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closesIts bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.--from "Tulips", written 18 March 1961”

“I am flushed and warm.I think I may be enormous,I am so stupidly happy,My wellingtonsSquelching and squelching through the beautiful red.”

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

“MirrorI am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.Whatever I see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.I am not cruel, only truthful-The eye of the little god, four cornered.Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so longI think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.Faces and darkness separate us over and over.Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Searching my reaches for what she really is.Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.I am important to her. She comes and goes.Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old womanRises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.--written 1960”

“I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.”

“Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream”