The heart lies to itself because it must.

We are resident inside with the machinery,

a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.

We exist with a wind whispering inside

and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,

inside the basilica of bones. The flesh

is a neighborhood, but not the life.

One of the great dangers is familiarity.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite.

You have to write a poem the way you ride a horse—you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day—you’ll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.

We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

I ask myself what

is the sound of women? What is the word for

that still thing I have hunted inside them

for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,

the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still

in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper

down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,

where something very far away in that body

is becoming something we don't have a name for.

You can't go to Paris anymore; it's not there. Greece and Japan aren't there anymore. The places I've loved no longer exist.

We are all burning in time, but each is consumed

at his own speed.

I failed high school; I got into college by mistake. I failed freshman English eight times. I was interested in learning, but I wanted to understand too, which meant I was fighting with the teachers all the time. Everybody accepted the fact that I was smart but I wouldn’t obey. I didn’t believe what they said unless they could prove it.

I have been easy with trees

Too long.

Too familiar with mountains.

Joy has been a habit.

Now

Suddenly

This rain.

The hard part for me is to find the poem—a poem that matters. To find what the poem knows that’s special. I may think of writing about the same thing that everyone does, but I really like to write a poem that hasn’t been written. And I don’t mean its shape. I want to experience or discover ways of feeling that are fresh. I love it when I have perceived something fresh about being human and being happy.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

You have to understand I didn't visit places; I lived places. It makes all the difference in the world.

Can you understand being alone so long

you would go out in the middle of the night

and put a bucket into the well

so you could feel something down there

tug at the other end of the rope?

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.