Possible, unthinkable, the cricket’s tiny back as I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.