And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.

If you should ask me where I've been all this time I have to say "Things happen." I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth, on the river ruined in its own duration: I know nothing save things the birds have lost, the sea I left behind, or my sister crying. Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock with day? Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths? And why the dead?

I was the owner of my own darkness.

I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter.