"[I]t wasn't until my late 60s that I knew poetry had found me. Everything that had gone before brought me to understand that poetry, reading it and writing it, is the work of my life's last act. As I write in the poem "When Hildegard cannot sleep," "…words/once empty shells/begin to sing//and the sweet ache/rises in my throat." I write to make music of a yearning I've always carried, yet cannot articulate with sure elegance. My words are, more often than not, blasphemy."