The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I came to love, I came into my own.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.