You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and – somehow – the wine.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.
A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.
In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.