Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

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

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.

It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.