The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.