But also there's an intimacy and acceptance there: we take it all as it comes.

“The purpose of poetry is not to learn more about poetry, but more about life,” Robert Bly said, and I believe him. I tell my poetry kids that poetry is life, how they live their lives, how they share their lives. The study of it is the study of what it means to be alive. What ends up on the page is the least important part of the process.

“Doesn’t it bother you sometimes / what living is, what the day has turned into?”

How do the sun and stars look to a bird’s eyes? ​ I pat the back of your heart.

Good poetry workshops have as much to do with listening as they do with talking; good poetry teachers are those with finely tuned ears, not fine pedigrees.

tonight i sit on the patch of grass behind my house and watch the stars edit the darkness

“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began. Sometimes if I close my eyes, I can go back into that moment, finding the colors now reflected against the flesh under my lids; I can imagine her posture and her size, her eyes wide open, taking it in; and then, whether it actually happened then or not, her shoulder at my shoulder, her left hand slipped into my right hand, forever there.

I am my own space station and astronaut. Drifting, drifting. So slight the tether yet how pliable.

“poetry is the displacement of silence, while prose is the continuation of noise.” Similarly, a poem doesn’t need to tell you the details of what a moment looked like, but it can find ways to show you what it felt like.

Her poems are courageous, intimate and quietly disruptive of the systems we operate with in. What if you felt the invisible tug between you and everything?

Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”

Look for me In the people I’ve known Or loved, And if you cannot give me away, At least let me live on in your eyes And not your mind.

I want to make the body into sky.                                              – Anish Kapoor, on his sculpture Marsyas (2002), Turbine Hall, Tate Modern No, I can’t imagine it–– I, the taut tongue in an unsheltered             mouth dizzy with the earth as it turnsand turns. At least let me be skin. Something beneath skin.

I didn’t (and don’t) know the answer but the question rang deep and useful. ​ It was a beautiful thing to hang out with each poem, poet, line for longer than I thought I could or should. And that’s saying something given that I set type one letter at a time.

I’ve arrived at myself again. The sun builds a slow house inside my house, touching the stilled curtains,

This was one way to be inside the world rather than outside looking into a bright window.

Is that Eric Garner worked

Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8eexi1xb775rmez/Screen%20Shot%202020-08-14%20at%201.09.26%20PM.png?dl=0 The moon wired to the sky the children we’re becoming, / those orphans—

A long time afraid of the filigree of light, what you imagine to be the wing of a bird cleaving your face, air on your eyes before you can shut them. It's the only thing you see. It's the kind of wick you cannot lick your fingers to put out. --- the filigree / of light

of the foot’s silver prayer.

Her poems feel buoyant to read

Today you find yourself guilty

each kindness \ reaching toward another

and every door in the breathing house bumps softly for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness or question why, for what, how long?

Immense, entirely itself,

I pulled out a bouquet of skyscrapers.

It is my 37th birthday today, and what I really crave, more than anything, is a continuity to my days. Not an accumulation, the sense that they’re adding up to anything, not necessarily, just a continuity. The sense that one day leads into another leads into another leads into another on and on and on.

Of the familiar Propitious haze? Of snug unawareness. The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.

cabinets of my will. On such legs as are left me, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.

Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness and the rain and breathing in the quiet air