We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.