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

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

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

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

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.