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

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

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

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