A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

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

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

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

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

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

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.