What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that's it. Sunlight darkens the earth.

How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
 floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
 with no ripple, without us in it.

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Poetry is the dark side of the moon.

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.