It was late, and we were tired.

We assumed there would be other nights.

Anna's breathing started to slow, but I still wanted to talk.

She rolled onto her side.

I said, I want to tell you something.

She said, you can tell me tomorrow.

I had never told her how much I loved her.

She was my sister.

We slept in the same bed.

There was never a right time to say it.

(It was always unnecessary.)

The books in my father's shed were sighing.

The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.

I thought about waking her.

(But it was unnecessary.)

There would be other nights.

(And how can you say I love you to someone you love?)

I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.

Here's the point of everything I've been trying to tell you..

It's always necessary.

I love you,

________________________________________

"Do you know what a poem is, Esther?"

"No, what?" I would say.

"A piece of dust."

Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, "So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together."

.... People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.

________________________________________

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately.

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of a little god, four cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.