It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.