Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

If any of you on your journeys see her-shout to me, whistle...he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere he could hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as if he were no longer on stage.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.