Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant. your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don't forget me," you whispered the day you died. I won't.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.