When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.

And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

What can I have that I still want?

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.