The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then."

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

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.

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

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