For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

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.

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

You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.