Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.

In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

What is usual is not what is always.As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.Footsteps resume their clipped edges,birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.Where were they? By what route did they return?A woman mute for yearsforms one perfect sentence before she dies.