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.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

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.

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

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