In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.