He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out....

Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy....

It didn’t get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren’t looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well...

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has...

You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this...

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too...

Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by...

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get...

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know...

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts...

Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on...