Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away..

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palet….

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together..

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink..

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room..

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actu….

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your….

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first..

The same words come from each mouth differently..

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm..

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds..

The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the ….

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us..

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life..

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes..

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement..

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is b….

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes..

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything.

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays..

Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble..