You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.

You have no faith in your own language. So you invest authority in signs you cannot read with any accuracy.

If you would open your eyes you would see me, you would see the emptiness of heaven mirrored on earth, the fields vacant again, lifeless, covered with snow— then white light no longer disguised as matter.

Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden is not the real world. Machines are the real world. Say frankly what any fool could read in your face: it makes sense to avoid us, to resist nostalgia. It is not modern enough, the sound the wind makes stirring a meadow of daisies: the mind cannot shine following it. And the mind wants to shine,

for these vines.

You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible

I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty

even here, even at the beginning of love, her hand leaving his face makes an image of departure and they think they are free to overlook this sadness.

if you worship one god, you only need one enemy—