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

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.

I see that I must give what I most need.

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

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

The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.

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.