She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

The burial of feelings has begun.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.