Blue Willow Moon

“I mainly ask so that any of our pasts / may temporarily be more than people and things taking / the scenic, permanent trip into mist, and so that we, / who meet inexplicably in the world of ink and paper, / may assume the shared posture of slanted grass.”

“The spring choked on its own waters.

“As an adult he wrote of his peculiar awareness of the simultaneity of time, the dreamlike merging of past and present in the pool of memory.”

“I wish to worship at the wood’s heart, the stone’s eye, the language found forming forever in the swaying cranes of the trees.”

“The process of my inevitable disappearance was initiated at the moment of my birth. And the longer I live, the more I vanish. My feelings and my emotions vanish, my pain and my joy; the places I’ve seen vanish, and the people I’ve met. My memories vanish, as do my thoughts. My conception of the world vanishes. My body vanishes, more and more every day. The world within me and around me vanishes, leaving no trace, and I can do nothing to safeguard it.”

“I remember the hair that stuck to your lips, I taste your lips with the hair on my tongue, I whistle alone when the light is dim, [. . .] the common bonds, the morning rays, the salty skin, the story I tell of the story we made, September, October, November…”

“There are spaces for living

“I can’t undo all I have done unto myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.

beneath willow limbs