One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

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