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

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

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

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.

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

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.