It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them ... A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.