Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation.
Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.
We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.
Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules.
What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?
Attention without feeling – is only a report.
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.