How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.

To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.