I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.

I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.