And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.

We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?

A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.

So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

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