We Must Have The Stubbornness To Accept

Fame Is A Lot Of Fun, But It's Not Interesting. I Loved Being Noticed And Praised, Even The Banquets. But They Didn't Have Anything That I Wanted. After About Six Months, I Found It Boring.

You Will Love Again, People Say. Give It Time. Me With Time Running Out. Day After Day Of The Everyday. What They Call Real Life, Made Of Eighth-inch Gauge. Newness Strutting Around As If It Were Significant. Irony, Neatness And Rhyme Pretending To Be Poetry. I Want To Go Back To That Time After Michiko's Death When I Cried Every Day Among The Trees. To The Real. To The Magnitude Of Pain, Of Being That Much Alive.

It Is Convenient For The Old Men To Blame Eve. To Insist We Are Damned Because A Country Girl Talked To The Snake One Afternoon Long Ago. Children Must Starve In Somalia For That, And Old Women Be Abandoned In Our Greatest Cities. It’s Why We Will Finally Be Thrown Into The Lakes Of Molten Lead. Because She Was Confused By Happiness That First Time Anyone Said She Was Beautiful. Nevertheless, She Must Be The Issue, So People Won’t Notice That Rocks And Galaxies, Mathematics And Rust Are Also Created In His Image.

The Woman Is Not Just A Pleasure, Nor Even A Problem. She Is A Meniscus That Allows The Absolute To Have A Shape, That Lets Him Skate However Briefly On The Mystery, Her Presence Luminous On The Ordinary And The Grand. Like The Odor At Night In Pittsburgh’s Empty Streets After Summer Rain On Maples And Sycamore.

We Exist With A Wind Whispering Inside And Our Moon Flexing. Amid The Ducts, Inside The Basilica Of Bones.