Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.
Love is the outlaw's duty.
Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.
The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.
As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.
The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.