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.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.

No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.