Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon. That means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.




The criss cross of fingers behind my head and the soft cotton sheets my mother washed once and the brick walls and the words:

into the strenuous briefness, into the strenuous briefness, into the strenuous briefness...

It's late now, but my day was so beautiful I'm having trouble sleeping. It's a delectable mangle of memory now, hookah smoke and classroom carpet, and I'm drunk on words and the world they open up inside of me. My melted recollection is of a wonderful professor, sternly telling the class that if we had a problem with people fucking or killing we should get out of his class. He read the poem written above here and made it the most delicate, exquisite, moving organ, pockets of pieces of fragments of little everythings

Can I write? Am I any good at it? And if I am, do have anything to say or the courage to say it?

into the strenuous briefness

Carolyn and I discovered that poem on the road somewhere on the East Coast, and we KNEW that it would change us. "Read it again," she breathed, and I did, and I did, and I now know its edges and shadows. These words will change you, the professor said, if you just leave the window cracked. And if you do, perhaps it will be pushed open...