"Any day now you must start to dwell in it,
the poetry, and for this, grave preparations must be made, the walks of sand
raked, the rubble wall picked clean of dead vine stems, but what
if poetry were something else entirely, not this purple weather
with the eye of a god attached, that sees
inward and outward? What is it were only a small, other way of living,
like being in the wind? or letting the various settling sounds we hear now
rest and record the effort of any creature has to put forth to summon its spirits
        for a moment and then
fall silent, hoping that enough has happened? Sometimes we do perceive it
this way, like animals that will get up and move somewhere and then drop down"

Excerpt from Flow Chart, John Ashbery.

"And in these weeks of work and silence, when I see only two or three people in seven days, I am never lonely.  I feel well, so full of ideas and "things to do," so fully conscious, so centered in work, that this is as close to happiness as I can imagine.  "For what is happiness, but work in peace?" I wrote long ago in Santa Fe."

– May Sarton, At Seventy