You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Who knows what will happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.

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