My mother never forgave my father.

I like an ending that’s both a door and a window.

Memory is each man’s poet-in-residence.

In every house of marriage there’s room for an interpreter.

I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, ‘End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live – to grow, to bear fruit.

End with an image and don’t explain.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.

The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.