We Must Unlearn The Constellations To See

We Are Resident Inside With The Machinery, A Glimmering Spread Throughout The Apparatus. We Exist With A Wind Whispering Inside And Our Moon Flexing. Amid The Ducts, Inside The Basilica Of Bones. The Flesh Is A Neighborhood, But Not The Life.

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.

The Abandoned Valley Can You Understand Being Alone So Long You Would Go Out In The Middle Of The Night And Put A Bucket Into The Well So You Could Feel Something Down There Tug At The Other End Of The Rope?

I Like Ornament At The Right Time, But I Don't Want A Poem To Be Made Out Of Decoration ... When I Read The Poems That Matter To Me, It Stuns Me How Much The Presence Of The Heart-in All Its Forms-is Endlessly Available There. To Experience Ourselves In An Important Way Just Knocks Me Out. It Puzzles Me Why People Have Given That Up For Cleverness. Some Of Them Are Ingenious, More Ingenious Than I Am, But So Many Of Them Aren't Any Good At Being Alive.

How Astonishing It Is That Language Can Almost Mean, And Frightening That It Does Not Quite.