The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.

They've healed me to pieces.

How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you're there, with a splinter of life.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.

Don't sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live.

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.

Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle