So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.