When People Suffer, Their Relationships Usually Suffer

I Think We Fall In Love And Become Adults And Become Citizens In A Way By Writing Stories About Ourselves.

I Do Have A Really Good Memory. I Mean, Like, I Can Remember All The Phone Numbers Of Everybody On The Street I Grew Up On.

The Words And Sentences You Take Into Your Body From Books Are No Less Sacred And Healing Than Communion. Surely At Least One Such Person Lives In Your Zip Code.

The Lesson You've Got To Learn Is The Someday You'll Someday Stagger To, Blinking In Cold Light, All Tears Shed, Ready To Poke Your Bovine Head In The Yoke They've Shaped. Everyone Learns This. Born, Everyone Breathes, Pays Tax, Plants Dead And Hurts Galore. There's Grief Enough For Each. My Mother Learned By Moving Man To Man, Outlived Them All. The Parched Earth's Bare (once She Leaves It) Of Any Who Watched The Instants I Trod It. Other Than Myself, Of Course. I've Made A Study Of Bearing And Forbearance. Everyone Does, It Turns Out, And Note Those Faces Passing By: Not One's A God.

Poetry Is For Me Eucharistic. You Take Someone Else's Suffering Into Your Body, Their Passion Comes Into Your Body, And In Doing That You Commune, You Take Communion, You Make A Community With Others.