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 ….

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….

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

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 ….

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….

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..

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

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

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

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….

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

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

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….

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

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us.

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

... 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….

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….

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….

Desire can make anything into a god..