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.

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

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.

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.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.