I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself..

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on th….

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain.

I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get thr….

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him..

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us ca….

The older I get, the more I feel..

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up..

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver..

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky..

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour..

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown..

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photogr….

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each oth….

We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more..

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less..

.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one a….

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother..

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school..

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back..