Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam

The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.