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.

Duende I can't remember her name. It's not as though I've been in bed with that many women. The truth is I can't even remember her face. I kind of know how strong her thighs were, and her beauty. But what I won't forget is the way she tore open the barbecued chicken with her hands, and wiped the grease on her breasts.

I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn't think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don't have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.

What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

Why do so manysettle for so little? I don't understand why they're not greedy for what's inside them.

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.

We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.