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

The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.

I grew up in a sad, depressed place. I got out. Poetry saved my life.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.