Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet

Red Wheel Barrow

It is too hard for me
to watch the red wheel barrow in the rain
and not think of Dr. Williams
sitting in his study
fighting back the story
of the hands
and how the hands would nail
then rest, then hold bread to the mouth
and finally sleep under the face
of the man who made it.

From Ars Poetica?

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

~Czeslaw Milosz, Bells In Winter

Old Movie

It is not the waving of the white handkerchief
he will remember long after the train lurches
as if he were in an old movie being shown
to children at the end of the world.

No, it is not the bloom of the white cloth
signaling surrender in the stale air of the station
or the incandescence of our skin under the moon,
nor will he recall the flecks of rust in her irises
or the turbulence of their passion—

It will be how she turned away to walk home
and her brief turning back toward him
as if she remembered a phrase in a perfect language
to describe the velocity of sorrow.

My Grandmother's Purse

When I was seven, sometime between the last gasping death of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Sputnik launch, my step-grandmother would occasionally drop by our house on a Sunday afternoon. Not all that exciting actually for a kid my age—I was busy setting a model of the Alamo on fire or searching desperately for an escaped hamster—except for one thing: she always brought her purse, black silk, ribbony folds and a mock turtle (I hope) top hinge that snapped so loud it could be heard in the basement (by the hamster who was nesting near the hot water heater).

Inside said purse, there were cough drops so strong that they made your head spin, and I was addicted to them as if they were some kind of necessary, but secret, serum—that is, if secret serum makes your head explode, your sinuses decongest for a fortnight and your eyes dilate like Cruella deVille tracking down a dalmatian. I'm not sure what they were, but when she offered me one, she did it with a knowing look like, "oh you little junkie, don't worry I won't let on.”

In fact, when she opened the purse it released the strangest amalgam of scents that to this day I would be able to recognize if there were some sort of bizarre Proustian contest. Chanel No. 5, talcum powder, lipstick, and the camphorous honey of the coughdrops.

I later determined that had we souls, they would smell exactly like this.

Lizard Juice

I wish you would go all woodsy like dive into the green octave of spring soy get to know the Mama, eat the mineral before she eats you, stead of letting death dine for you and binging on that oil, you heard me, that oil, that lizard juice

This Place

This is an odd place where anything goes. The weather changes in a second. Image and thought are relative only to the moment. They are SOSs, telegrams, discards from Joseph Cornell constructions, journal entries, a witnessing of the random, feathers in the tail of the Bird of Chaos, whistlings in the dark, prayers spoken into a cobwebbed well, folded indecipherable smudges of notes found in the corner of an old wallet dropped along the highway, things you would say alone to a newborn child or would confess to an stranger on a crosstown bus. It is about fractions, not whole numbers. Peeks, glimpses. Aperçus—not portraits, not full views.

This place is about knowing the house is on fire and knowing exactly what you would take if you could take only one thing.