You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday. What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant. Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.

Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray And yellow A terrible amber. In the cold streets Your warm body. In whatever room Your warm body. Among all the people Your absence The people who are always Not you. I have been easy with trees Too long. Too familiar with mountains. Joy has been a habit. Now Suddenly This rain.

We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.

Are the angels of her bed the angels who come near me alone in mine? Are the green trees in her window the color is see in ripe plums? If she always sees backward and upside down without knowing it what chance do we have? I am haunted by the feeling that she is saying melting lords of death, avalanches, rivers and moments of passing through, And I am replying, "Yes, yes. Shoes and pudding.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.