It is snowing here this morning. In the spotlight of the street lamp outside my bedroom window, the flakes swirl up and down, back and forth, every which way except down. The stop sign beside the crosswalk twitches steadily in the wind, and the frail twigs of the sidewalk trees, bare of snow, bounce and tremble, bounce and tremble, without cease.

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At the grocery store on Sunday, I ran into another poet in the produce section. He was cogitating over apples as I sorted through oranges. It was the literary life and/or the badly-paid-household-member-responsible-for-stocking-the-refrigerator life in action. Either that, or it was a metaphor for [insert abstract noun]. We enjoyed talking to one another but did not mention our fruit.

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Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas.

--Adam Gopnik, speculating that Shakespeare read a 1603 translation of Montaigne's essays, New Yorker, January 16, 2017