Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant. your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don't forget me," you whispered the day you died. I won't.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'