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.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.
You must not ever stop being whimsical.
A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.
Life is much the same when it’s going well – resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster’s seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement – how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!
The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe.
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.
You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.
Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It’s duty.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.