"A terrible violence of creation, A flash into the burning heart of the abominable; Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant, The burning lake turns into a forest pool, The fire subsides into rings of water, A sunlit silence."

"Yet for this we travelled With hope, and not alone, In the country of ourselves, In a country of bright stone."

"You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is."

"There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched."

"You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés."

"Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."

"The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods."

"There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom. (p. 95)"

"In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write. (p. 89)"

"Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)"

"And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love's sake;And everything comes to One, As we dance on, dance on, dance on."

"God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one! The small become the great, the great the small; The right thing happens to the happy man."

"Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will — The right thing happens to the happy man."

"I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow Upon that God who knows what I would know."

"Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire."

"To whom does this terrace belong? — With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust, Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs? Not to me, but this lizard, Older than I, or the cockroach."

"Being, not doing, is my first joy."

"Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit; Too close immediacy an exhaustion"

"I have gone into the waste lonely places Behind the eye."

"How can I rest in the days of my slowness? I've become a strange piece of flesh, Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery, With a cheek soft as a hound's ear. What's left is light as a seed; I need an old crone's knowing."

"The moon draws back its waters from the shore. By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan, And she is what I would. In this light air, Lost opposites bend down — Sing of that nothing of which all is made, Or listen into silence, like a god."

"I lived with deep roots once: Have I forgotten their ways — The gradual embrace Of lichen around stones?"

"The night wind rises. Does my father live? Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul. My flesh is breathing slower than a wall. Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love."

"Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out what I could of all desire; I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone. Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone."

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to a motion not my own; What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)"

"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!"

"This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go."

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Dante attained the purgatorial hill, Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw, Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, — Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw? All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure."

"I take this cadence from a man named Yeats: I take it and I give it back again: For other tunes and other wanton beats Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain. Yes, I was dancing mad, and how That came to be the bears and Yeats would know."

"Beginnings start without shade, Thinner than minnows. The live grass whirls with the sun, Feet run over the simple stones, There's time enough. Behold, in the lout's eye, love."

"Bless me and the maze I'm in! Hello, thingy spirit."

"I'll seek my own meekness. What grace I have is enough. The lost have their own pace. The stalks ask something else. What the grave says, The nest denies."

"To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface, When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island; To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward; To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing."

"Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse: Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms. Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called; The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows; And love, love sang toward."

"The wasp waits. The edge cannot eat the center. The grape listens. The path tells little to the serpent. An eye comes out of the wave. The journey from flesh is longest. A rose sways least. The redeemer comes a dark way."

"Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear. Renew the light, lewd whisper."

"The wind sharpened itself on a rock; A voice sang:"

"I saw the separateness of all things! My heart lifted up with the great grasses; The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds."

"A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."

"The mind moved, not alone, Through the clear air, in the silence."

"Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going, I have married my hands to perpetual agitation, I run, I run to the whistle of money."

"Who stunned the dirt into noise? Ask the mole, he knows. I feel the slime of a wet nest. Beware Mother Mildew. Nibble again, fish nerves."

"Voice, come out of the silence. Say something. Appear in the form of a spider Or a moth beating the curtain. Tell me: Which is the way I take; Out of what door` do I go, Where and to whom? Dark hollows said, lee to the wind, The moon said, back of an eel, The salt said, look by the sea, Your tears are not enough praise, You will find no comfort here, In the kingdom of bang and blab."

"I shook the softening chalk of my bones, Saying, Snail, snail, glister me forward, Bird, soft-sigh me home, Worm, be with me. This is my hard time."

"At Woodlawn I Heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, A slow drip over stones, Toads brooding wells."

"I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions."

"Over the gulfs of dream Flew a tremendous bird Further and further away Into a moonless black, Deep in the brain, far back."