She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

When I read, I want to be fully transported to another place. I want to feel things, smell things.

This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue-people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.

And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.