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Arriving on earth’s paradise, wearing only light for their bodies.

David Hinton

Flesh is temporary, memory a tilting barn dismantled nail by nail.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

My brother stealing all the lightbulbs, my parents live without light.

And the starved heart starts over, writing one line at a time.

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?

On a morning in November words appeared at the end of my pen.

But we do despise beauty. We connect it with softness and immortality.

Everyone they pass is consumed by some desperate interior story.

Ike’s voice left behind on the shore as Tina plunges in again.

The urge to be a tiny bird upon a tiny limb, maybe a bridled titmouse.

The leaves of the olives were made entirely of night, as if cut out of skies.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden was edited by Tom Jenks.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

Everyone has something lodged and jittering inside them.

The writer was there ahead of the world. And that was a great moment . . .

My closet was a repository of foibles and fetishes, an archive of my life history.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

Kansas is a cold dessert, I say. No, Kansas is a tongue depressor, he says.

Sublime or ridiculous, the poet seeks to constrain language.

In that world I was a fish too eager to enter the nets; here, I’m a river.

The draft of ten handwritten pages would have to be cut back to five.

We could use our arms to squeeze or hold or load not a gun, not a gun.

There is a pinhole of light through the fog. A skiff on a lake.

I am the king of doing wheelies on the Stingray bicycle of my mind.

Omens from the Lord, or Nature, the clouds, some darker silhouette.

Enough with the stranger, their transcendent experience of art.