That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon, a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.

I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.