Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.