I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieki….

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold..

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass..

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love..

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body..

Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself wit….

Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!.

But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of….

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one h….

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second hist….

Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you ….

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart..

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city..

Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world..

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful..

When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across th….

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, ….

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life..

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: ….

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst..

The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things ….