As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another.

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.