It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the nightthe beloved body, compass, polestar,to hear the quiet breathing that saysI am alive, that means alsoyou are alive, because you hear me,you are here with me.

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window asthe image of my father, whose lifewas spent like this,thinking of death, to the exclusionof other sensual matters,so in the end that lifewas easy to give up, sinceit contained nothing: evenmy mother's voice couldn't make himchange or turn backas he believedthat once you can't love another human beingyou have no place in the world.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

The assignment was to fall in love.The details were up to you.The second part wasto include in the poem certain words,words drawn from a specific texton another subject altogether.

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.

I sleep so you will be alive, it is that simple.

You're in the garden, you're where John is, in the dirt, abstracted, holding his green trowel.This is how he gardens: fifteen minutes of intense effort, fifteen minutes of ecstatic contemplation.