The Loss of Poetry

My body needs it—the hot baths, the care, the soft water, the perfume, the warmth. I take on the colors of the flowers, the bloom, the delicacy. It becomes me.

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat.”

What is it that a shadow is trying to say / with the borrowed tongue of silence? Here I stand, // having heard all that has been said, / and like the prolonged abundance of an olive tree // I recall only the beauty of a life, / vast and resilient.

slicing gaping wounds in all your glances. / And there, just where the pain makes you stop and think, / that’s the very place / I put down my roots.

“A star looks down at me, And says: ‘Here I and you Stand, each in our degree. What do you mean to do,— Mean to do?’ I say: ‘For all I know, Wait, and let Time go by, Till my change come,’—‘Just so.’ The star says: ‘So mean I;— So mean I.’”