Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Things take the time they take. Don't worry.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.