There was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world.

I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession.... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. And I didn't question if I should - I just kept sharpening the pencils!

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.

And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful—how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.

Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up. I often say if you could lay out all the writing I did in those years, it would go to the moon and back. It was bad, it was derivative. But when you love what you're doing, honestly, you can get better.

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must

take care of what has been

given. Brush her hair, help her

into her little coat, hold her hand,

especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be

sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness

would be yours. Take care, touch

her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone.

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast

terrible shadows, that each of the so-called

senseless acts has its thread looping

back through the world and into a human heart.

Once in a while,

you can creep out of your own life

and become someone else--

an explosion

in that nest of wires

we call the imagination.

Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

How does any of us live in this world?

One thing compensates for another, I suppose.

Sometimes what's wrong does not hurt at all, but rather

shines like a new moon.

How many mysteries have you seen in your

lifetime? How many nets pulled

full over the boat's side, each silver body

ready or not falling into

submission? How many roses in early summer

uncurling above the pale sands then

falling back in unfathomable

willingness? And what can you say? Glory

to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the

silver fish. Glory to time and the wild fields,

and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.