At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

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.

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

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.