Would you consider a train passing—or the city in the icy sky—a love song? What else? It must be so. And if I told you the dark trees against the night sky and the row of the city’s lights beyond and under them—would you consider that a love statement? This is what my poems have been from the first. It is simple. There is no symbolism, no evocation of an image. It is so. —William Carlos Williams, January: A Novelette (Imaginations, 298-299)

Nails hammered into living wood does not hurt it much: two two-by-fours proip up a leaning tree. On this narrow, manicured intersection, we do not allow a tree to fall.

9 March 1984, Cupertino