I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body... and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

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

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.

But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

And what has become of it, where is that onetime love? Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain.