Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.

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

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

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

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

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.