I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.

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

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.

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

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.