Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.