When my house passes through winter it passes through a pattern of depression and reality that avoids any literal interpretation of its experience or disorder. The best poems are always accused of being artless because they seem to pick up and leave off any- where, while the worst are satis ed with their own intrinsic, facile perfection.

The difference in age between lovers only begins to seem import- ant when people get old and the margins of death move more clearly in and restrict every moment to the clearness of water. The body is always fresh again after sleep and after it arrives back at the source of its immense light and alters the composition of the world just by seeing it through the plainness of a poem (or through the Corot’s or Manet’s we left fermenting in the sun).

To be with people, to disclose oneself, is to point into space and say “love”: to emerge constantly out in the sum of becoming, vitiating the nonsense of death with our hands.

Our tropes gently conceal themselves in what comes after: mar- riage, children, our own sense of unfortunate/fortunate repeti- tion. The mimicry of real presences, real emotions comes out in the facility of our touch: the exchange of childhood memories like macrophages, the twisting of cognitive geometry until it resembles a golden braid. The parcels of nature are tied up with bows: the garden, strictly speaking, is tended only at night.