Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.
Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.
These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.
When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s allThere was to it.
It came to my house.It sat on my shoulders.Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
…Then a man turnedAnd said to me: “Although I love the past, the dark of it,The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the allOf it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more…
There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe’ll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been Had we not taken his place.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at least to ourselves.
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way.
There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.