Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out.

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.