Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.

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

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

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.

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

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.