To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damned hard.
Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.
The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
Now is the time. It is never too late to start something.
The fog comes on little cat feet.
There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child’s name is All Children.
Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.
I am! I have come through! I belong!
Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.
Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.
Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.
Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.
The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.
Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’
All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.
Under the harvest moon, When the soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights, Death, the gray mocker, Comes and whispers to you As a beautiful friend Who remembers.