Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

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

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

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.

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.