All summer the half voice lurked behind me

& I played deaf for days for to live

To not write about it to use my body

I close in on facts fine as sugar
poured from a bottle labeled salt,
comprehend nothing.

don’t read this text who knows what
it will open or close in you so read what
until now for so many years you read that

you’re home. eating lentils. talking to your
loved one. you’re abroad. eating lentils. talking to
your loved one. you’re not yourself. you’ve been stolen.
you’re talking to your lentils. you’re not a knife, not cotton.

Grubby, unknown child playing at my door,
I don’t ask if you bring me a message full of symbols.
I’m drawn to you because I’ve never seen you before,
And, of course, if you were clean, you’d be a different child,
You wouldn’t even come here.
Play in the dust, go on, play!

It’s night. The night is very dark. In a house a long way off
Shines the light from a window.
I see it, and I feel human from head to toe.
It’s odd that the whole life of the person who lives there, and who I don’t know,
Draws me in simply because of that distant light.
His life is doubtless real, and he has a face, gestures, family, and profession.
Now, though, all that matters to me is the light in his window.

I never kept sheep,
But it’s as if I had.
My soul is like a shepherd,
It knows the wind and the sun
And walks hand in hand with the Seasons,
Following and looking.
All the peace of peopleless Nature
Comes to sit by my side.
But I feel as sad as a sunset is
To our imagination,
When we see it fading in the distance
And feel the night enter
Like a butterfly through the open window.

wordless, but not quite silent
unless to say love, unless not to speak
—there is leftover gunpowder in this line
becoming a simplified beginning

poetry is a sky giving this its performance

the grass of passion decreases
on the basis of us, decreases

the idea is like a boat sliding by
read pearls, beginning to roll
internal cries of cliffs beginning to resemble the sea