Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.

There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

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.

In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.

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.

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.

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...

When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at least to ourselves.

My NameOnce when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I...

Lines for WinterTell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark...

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even...

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we...

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...

I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the...

The Continuous Life What of the neighborhood homes awashIn a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,Signs that the irregular pleasures of movingFrom day to day, of being...

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger … in touch with—or at least close to—what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report...

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way.

The Coming of LightEven this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up...

…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...

There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.