“While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.”

“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”

“We suffer each other to have each other a while.”

“You thinkof a woman, a favoritedress, your old father's breaststhe last time you saw him, his breath,brief, the leafyou've torn from a vine and which you hold nowto your cheek like a train ticketor a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade--it all dependson the course of your memory.It's a place for those who own no placeto correspond to ruins in the soul.It's mine.It's all yours.”

“That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.”

“I am that last, thatfinal thing, the bodyin a white sheet listening,”

“People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.”