“I want to sleep like the birdsthen wake to write you againwithout hope that you read me.”

“I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine”

“The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.”

“To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it”

“You think that theirdying is the worstthing that could happen.Then they stay dead.”

“Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations / Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains / As distant as the curving of the earth, / Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air.-from "Love is Like Sounds”

“When I was nineteen,I told a thirty-year-old man what afool I had been whenI was seventeen.'We were always,' hesaid glancing down, 'afool two years ago.”