One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.

The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.

I want nothing from You but to see You.

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

My life failed on the very day I was born.

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.