Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you
My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words
We keep asking where they have gonethose years we remember and wereach for them like hands in the night
Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for
even there a shining is flowing from all the stonesthough the eyes are not yet made that can see it
On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree
I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.