I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.