over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.