The Tragic Thing About Learning From Experience

I Live Alone, Perhaps For No Good Reason, For The Reason That I Am An Impossible Creature, Set Apart By A Temperament I Have Never Learned To Use As It Could Be Used, Thrown Off By A Word, A Glance, A Rainy Day, Or One Drink Too Many. My Need To Be Alone Is Balanced Against My Fear Of What Will Happen When Suddenly I Enter The Huge Empty Silence If I Cannot Find Support There. I Go Up To Heaven And Down To Hell In An Hour, And Keep Alive Only By Imposing Upon Myself Inexorable Routines. I Write Too Many Letters And Too Few Poems.

What Is There To Do When People Die - People So Dear And Rare - But Bring Them Back By Remembering?

May We Agree That Private Life Is Irrelevant? Multiple, Mixed, Ambiguous At Best - Out Of It We Try To Fashion The Crystal Clear, The Singular, The Absolute, And That Is What Is Relevant; That Is What Matters.

We Are All, Whether We Know It Or Not, In Search Of A Way To Enrich, To Drink During The Fizz, To Inhale Deeper Our Gifts, In A Desperation For Some Little Understanding Before Death.

We Are Never Done With Thinking About Our Parents, I Suppose, And Come To Know Them Better Long After They Are Dead Than We Ever Did When They Were Alive.