How you die out in me:

down to the last
worn-out
knot of breath
you're there, with a
splinter
of life.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Each arrow you shoot off
carries its own target
into the decidedly
secret
tangle

rush of pine scent (once upon a time),

the unlicensed conviction
there ought to be another way
of saying
this.

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.