What a wondrous thing to suddenly be alive eating Natalie's lingonberry jam from Alaska, where she picked the fruit herself with one seeing eye. In this tumultuous world we're living in— with the one-hour news loop—my thoughts linger, more and more, on the darkish side as I sit at the table with Mr. & Mrs. Spork, who still ask me, Are you married yet? But Natalie's lingonberry jam pierces right through into some deep, essential place, where I am my own master and no sodomy laws exist, and where, like a snowflake, or a bee lost amid the posies, I feel autonomous, blissed-out, and real.
from the book BLIZZARD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"[T]his week’s poem explores the processes that bring a new poem into, and beyond, the writer’s 'upper mind.' The tone is that of a friendly, authoritative practitioner, a speaker drawing on her own very substantial experience."
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"My home mountain range, the Colorado Sangre de Cristo, is an 80-mile fault-block uplift, with ten summits over 14,000 feet....Walking there for the last forty years has helped me learn that place is neither fixed nor purely spatial, but temporary and temporal, contingent and unstable, an intersection of forces I happen to encounter (and take part in) during my brief time on earth and briefer time as walker through a landscape. Here & now is a knot, and all its strands are moving."
