Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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 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.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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