Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.