“By preventing myself from thinking about how to do more with my day or why I hadn’t accomplished as much as so-and-so—by ‘doing nothing’—I constructed a new framework of what mattered to me.”

I want to convey to my students that what poetry does above all, and Roethke above others, is help us see the world, not outside of ourselves as much as in our hearts, and in our own thoughts and words and expressions.

I found myself tensing in crowded places and in groups of loud teenagers, until Paris passed from curfew into our second confinement. Now my mind is over-packed with thoughts of isolation, injustice, and the upcoming election.

Sift past lives through a sieve, careful where the wind carries.

Tumble of organs, whose house of grief?

Reach past the veil. The spirits cannot hear you.

The three deaths of Susan Taubes occurred in one week.

“What he didn’t understand was that the more heavenly our experience, the starker its contrast with my mind’s occupations, the wider the chasm would yawn between us, the more alienated I’d be. It was like the story of Moses, in which the water of the Egyptians was turned into blood. A curse had crippled me. Shown blue ocean, I saw crimson gore.”