The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Love your self's self where it lives.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.