I Write In My Own Journal When

There Is A Certain Age At Which A Child Looks At You In All Earnestness And Delivers A Long, Pleased Speech In All The True Inflections Of Spoken English, But With Not One Recognizable Syllable. There Is No Way You Can Tell The Child That If Language Had Been A Melody, He Had Mastered It And Done Well, But That Since It Was In Fact A Sense, He Had Botched It Utterly.

There Was Only Silence. It Was The Silence Of Matter Caught In The Act And Embarrassed. There Were No Cells Moving, And Yet There Were Cells. I Could See The Shape Of The Land, How It Lay Holding Silence. Its Poise And Its Stillness Were Unendurable, Like The Ring Of The Silence You Hear In Your Skull When You're Little And Notice You're Living The Ring Which Resumes Later In Life When You're Sick.

I Had Hopes For My Rough Edges. I Wanted To Use Them As A Can Opener, To Cut Myself A Hole In The World's Surface And Exit Through It.

It Is Difficult To Undo Our Own Damage, And To Recall To Our Presence That Which We Have Asked To Leave. It Is Hard To Desecrate A Grove And Change Your Mind. The Very Holy Mountains Are Keeping Mum. We Doused The Burning Bush And Cannot Rekindle It; We Are Lighting Matches In Vain Under Every Green Tree.

Admire The World For Never Ending On You -- As You Would An Opponent, Without Taking Your Eyes Away From Him, Or Walking Away.