We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.

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

instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.