The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

He’s already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I’d like to run off with, if...

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language – a happiness we were born to have.

At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against...

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you’re going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of...

There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.

Images are the pegs holding down memory’s billowing tent.

Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in...

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert’s been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her,...

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it.Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

What is life but this? Choices made early in a relationship determine the course.

Had his own way of praying, he had said; that old excuse. As if we were meant to be solitary. As if the church were not about holding the community together, as this sinful one...

And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, “go.