This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all….

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours..

... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, t….

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem..

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it..

Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your hear….

I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my….

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading..

Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of lo….

All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes..

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells a….

Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, o….

Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or mora….

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing ….

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and t….

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of ….

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know..

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath..

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded ….

Desire can make anything into a god..