New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

All blessings are mixed blessings.

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.