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.