It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.