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.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.