I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said you can do that when you're older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested changing the usual order of the same words in a line of verse why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard and the drink but he was deep in tides of his own through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was he was in his thirties he snapped down his nose with an accent I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me to paper my wall with rejection slips his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious

For the present there is just one moon, though every level pond gives back another.

But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon, perceived by the astrophysicist and the lover,

is milliseconds old. And even that light's seven minutes older than its source.

And the stars we think we see on moonless nights are long extinguished. And, of course,

this very moment, as you read this line, is literally gone before you know it.

Forget the here-and-now. We have no time but this device of wantoness and wit.

Make me this present then: your hand in mine, and we'll live out our lives in it.