You Can't Put Off Being Young Until

My Age Fallen Away Like White Swaddling Floats In The Middle Distance, Becomes An Inhabited Cloud.

If We Seriously Contemplate Life It Appears An Agony Too Great To Be Supported, But For The Most Part Our Minds Gloss Such Things Over & Until The Ice Finally Lets Us Through We Skate About Merrily Enough. Most People, I'm Convinced, Don't Think About Life At All. They Grab What They Think They Want And The Subsequent Consequences Keep Them Busy In An Endless Chain Till They're Carried Out Feet First.

The Poetic Impulse Is Distinct From Ideas About Things Or Feelings About Things, Though It May Use These. It's More Like A Desire To Separate A Piece Of One's Experience & Set It Up On Its Own, An Isolated Object Never To Trouble You Again, At Least Not For A Bit. In The Absence Of This Impulse Nothing Stirs.

I Have Wished You Something None Of The Others Would.

So Many Things I Had Thought Forgotten Return To My Mind With Stranger Pain: Like Letters That Arrive Addressed To Someone Who Left The House So Many Years Ago.