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

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

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

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