«How can I live with this burden — / And yet she’s called The Muse. / “She’s with you in a meadow … ,” they say. They say, “Divine muttering!” / She’ll seize you worse than a fever / And then, for an entire year, nothing at all.»
«You call this work, this breezy life: / Overhearing something / In music, then passing it off / Half-seriously as your own. Casting someone’s merry scherzo / Into lines of some sort / Swearing it’s your own poor heart / That aches in a bright meadow. Then eavesdropping on the woods...»
«The poet can’t be too sad / Or, worse still, too sly. / For general understanding, / The poet must be open wide. The footlights in front of him, / Bare and bright, deathly; / The cold blaze of limelight / Branding his face. But every reader is a secret, / A buried treasure, of sort...»
«Bursting into the house like startled thunder / The first one comes, breathless, laughing, / Fluttering at my throat and spinning / To the sound of its own applause. Another is born in the silence of midnight, / Stealing upon me from who knows where. / It peers at me from an empty mirror,...»