“Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided with trying to be a little less or more, escaping who I was a minute ago?”

“When I was last in Paris I was dirt poor, hiding from the Vietnam War. One night, in an old church, I considered taking my life. I didn't know how to be so young and not belong anywhere, stuck amon...”

“I could take a walk with my wife and try to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to. Or I could read all those books piling upabout the beginning of the end of understanding...Meanwhile, it's s...”

“Not one of the three black deaf-mutes who come here every day owns a dog. They sit under the fragrant decay of the big mossy oak speaking with their eyes and hands. They love dogs so much they vibr...”

“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hea...”

“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above t...”

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully a...”

“Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.We laughed, knowing that better men would come,And greater wars: whe...”

“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”