“When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.”

“No matter how you feel you have to actlike you are very popular with yourself;very relaxed and purposefulvery unconfusedand notlike you are walking through the sunshinesingingin chains.”

“Often we ask ourselvesto make absolute senseout of what just happens,and in this way, what we are practicingis suffering,which everybody practices,but strangely few of usgrow graceful in.”

“Outside the youth center, between the liquor storeand the police station,a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;overflowing with blossomfoam,like a sudsy mug of beer;like a bride ripping off her clothes,dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.It’s been doing that all week:making beauty,and throwing it away,and making more.”

“So the avenues we walk down,full of bodies wearing faces,are full of hidden talent:enough to make pianos moan,sidewalks split,streetlights deliriously flicker.”

“The future ours for a while to hold, with its heaviness—and hope moving from one location to anotherlike the holy ghost that it is.”

“What I thought was an endturned out to be a middle.What I thought was a brick wallturned out to be a tunnel.What I thought was an injusticeturned out to be a color of the sky.”