“I feel as if I start in a kind of wilderness, and I’m sort of making a way, a crossable path through it. Eventually I can realize where a poem came from—but that’s rarely what the poem is about.”

What they had for ideals
must persist in the taut set
of that rearing horse's head,

Flecked on a layer of mortar on the pillbox lid,
the tiles pieced together by some kindred myopic
have caught this much of Tuscany: hills worn down