These were spectacular nights, said my father. They were full of philosophy and political theory, noisy reversals, French movies.

The romantic grace we comprehend sits with ease in the real world; it is almost nothing.

Now he is carrion, stitched forever in the cramp of a trial.

No one can evict us from books! he used to say, running through astonishment at full speed.

AMOR FATI

Inside every world there is another world trying to get out,

and there is something in you that would like to discount this world.

The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts,

and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one.

You could claim professional fondness for the world around you;

the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive,

and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors.

Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one—

is this the great world, which is whatever is the case?

The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched

by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning.

Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life?

Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some,

and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.

THE VANISHING WORLD

It’s said that people tend to believe God believes what they believe.

When I was young I loved to get up before every dawn of the world, still sweetly baffled by the possibility of unbelief.

Perhaps grace is not so poor a thing that it can’t also appear in this instance like a new definition of luck,

akin to tiny blossoms out of cactus thorns in spring, their loneliness crushing your lungs.

Isn’t everything sloughed from the same star? What is believable and possible, what is acceptable and what is nothing?

Caught between the old and new year, why do you think that the old will be famous for its pain, the new from the liberation from pain?

Some kind of belief still runs off me in strings;

to enjoy the clarifying effect of participation without remainder may be the most mysterious thing.

When I come to the right place, I believe I’ll paint a door on it and walk right through.

NATURE MORTE

You are given two things today, one is an angry nail in your side;

Changing what you are able to sense is the second thing you are gifted.

Nature is always a referred existence, writes Emerson, never a presence.

Who knows where the time goes, sings Sandy Denny. Who can bear to hear it?

One reaches the moment when one loses words—in the pastoral, in the cosmic?

Think about the scars on the planets, & how patient those stars seem to be.