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.

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

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.