A Brief for the DefenseSorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise...

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous...

The Abandoned ValleyCan you understand being alone so longyou would go out in the middle of the nightand put a bucket into the wellso you could feel something down theretug at the other end of...

Once she said the world was an astonishing animal: light was its spirit and noise was its mind. That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.

Waking At NightThe blue river is grey at morningand evening. There is twilightat dawn and dusk. I lie in the darkwondering if this quiet in me nowis a beginning or an end.

Suddenly this defeat.This rain.The blues gone grayAnd the browns gone grayAnd yellowA terrible amber.In the cold streetsYour warm body.In whatever roomYour warm body.Among all the peopleYour absenceThe people who are alwaysNot you.I have been easy...

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and...

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, ‘What is the sound of the waterfall?’ ‘Silence,’ he finally told me.

DuendeI can’t remember her name.It’s not as though I’ve been in bedwith that many women.The truth is I can’t even rememberher face. I kind of know how strongher thighs were, and her beauty.But what I...

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon...

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come.

I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even...

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention...

The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves...

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers, A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace. And yet this poem would lessen that day....

We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the...

Failing and FlyingEveryone forgets that Icarus also flew.It’s the same when love comes to an end,or the marriage fails and people saythey knew it was a mistake, that everybodysaid it would never work. That she...