The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

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