How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

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.

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

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

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

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.