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

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

“The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.”

“Everything has two endings-a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.”

“The Cloudy VasePast time, I threw the flowers out,washed out the cloudy vase.How easily the old clearnessleapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside 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. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. 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.”

“I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may,in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent,or reach for a man: as one might stretchfor the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the topof the tree; too ripe for any moment but this,they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness,sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since,the answering yes.”