Inspired...

‘To dream is to know,“ I remember my grandfather telling me on more than one occasion. I realize that this phrase must have meant many things to him, not all of which I’ll ever know. But I do feel the vibration of these words of his in reminding me always that when your existence is poised on various kinds of precarity, the substance of visions is as real as the earth, the air, the water. It is not easy to situate oneself, if even for brief moments, on the other side of time, the other side of somewhere […].

“Over & over he whispered her name, trochaic as never, never, never, his heart losing its own sense of rhythm.”

“What you could be.”

Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity, coffee and bread with sour plum jam. Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods. Lives ticking on as if.

“They did not complain; for those who are down do not complain. Nor did they know they were down. Or, knowing it, they did not admit their downness. For to front so final a fact is to face with naked hands a lion; and to admit is to give in. Is to be washed away. To be lost and drowned. To be anonymous; unhelpable; alive no more; but debris, or a straw which the wind takes and sails, or tears, or drifts, or rots, to powder and forgetfulness.

The leakage of talk. My mind is dribbling out through my mouth.

We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man’s timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

If I were another person observing myself and the course of my life, I should be compelled to say that it must all end unavailingly, be consumed in incessant doubt, creative only in its self-torment. But, an interested party, I go on hoping.

Everything is for you: my daily prayer, And the thrilling fever of the insomniac, And the blue fire of my eyes, And my poems, that white flock.

Now, running alone in winter before dawn has come I have heard from the trees a trilling sound, an owl I suppose, a soft, hesitant voice, a woodwind, a breathy note. Then it is quiet again, all the way out in that space that goes on to the end of the world. And I think of beings more lonely than we are, clinging to branches or drifting wherever the air moves them through the dark and cold. I make a sound back, those times, always trying for only my place, one moving voice touching whatever is present or might be, even what I cannot see when it comes.