The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.