I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.