Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness.
I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
I don’t know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to drown in the shimmering miles of it...
I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.
Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
All eternity is in the moment.
If I’ve done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.
What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn’t come easy.
And now you’ll be telling stories of my coming back and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true but they’ll be real.
Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.