I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.

I'm vain enough to think that I've made a successful life. I've had everything I've ever wanted. You can't beat that.

We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.

THE ABANDONED VALLEY Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.

We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.