Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

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

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.