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

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

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.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

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

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.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.