Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.What dissolves will dissolve--you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices.

To Hear the Falling WorldOnly if I move my arm a certain way,it comes back.Or the way the light bends in the treesthis time of year,so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.I carry this in my body, seedin an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.But they guard me, these small pains,from growing sureof myself and perhaps forgetting.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of youor your days: they will be wrong,they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,you slept, you awakened.

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.It goes out to everything equally,circling rabbit and hawk.Look: in the iron bucket,a single nail, a single ruby -all the heavens and hells.They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.