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

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

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

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.

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

for these vines.

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.

from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.

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