I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling.... ("Seeing For a Moment")

Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.

Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.