I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.