In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.

We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.

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.