I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.