To Live And Die Amongst Foreigners May

One Can Say Of Language That It Is Potentially The Only Human Home, The Only Dwelling Place That Cannot Be Hostile To Man.

We Can Become Anything. That Is Why Injustice Is Impossible Here. There May Be The Accident Of Birth, There Is No Accident Of Death. Nothing Forces Us To Remain What We Were.

Sometimes, Because Of Its Immediacy, Television Produces A Kind Of Electronic Parable. Berlin, For Instance, On The Day The Wall Was Opened. Rostropovich Was Playing His Cello By The Wall That No Longer Cast A Shadow, And A Million East Berliners Were Thronging To The West To Shop With An Allowance Given Them By West German Banks! At That Moment The Whole World Saw How Materialism Had Lost Its Awesome Historic Power And Become A Shopping List.

My Heart Born Naked Was Swaddled In Lullabies. Later Alone It Wore Poems For Clothes. Like A Shirt I Carried On My Back The Poetry I Had Read. So I Lived For Half A Century Until Wordlessly We Met. From My Shirt On The Back Of The Chair I Learn Tonight How Many Years Of Learning By Heart I Waited For You.

What Any True Painting Touches Is An Absence - An Absence Of Which Without The Painting, We Might Be Unaware. And That Would Be Our Loss.