Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

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

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.

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.