According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from na… - William Carlos Williams

<p>At our age the imagination

across the sorry facts

lifts us

to make roses

stand before thorns.

Sure

love is cruel

and selfish

and totally obtuse — at least, blinded by the light,

young love is.

But we are older,

I to love

and you to be loved,
we have,

no matter how,

by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.</p>

<p> from “Journey to Love</p>

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers— old and experienced— returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast — a cold wind.