Surely my heart is sullen tonight

And weariness breaks upon me

with deadening glow

My musculature heaves to its own rhythm

Like a fantastical dirge framed by the night

With the very same weariness

My mind pens a line

Half-believing in its frail gifts

And on the broken back of this chunk of verse

I feel again the tenderness

That I thought had escaped

Senile destitution,

the currency of the market,

personal trade of ages,

capitulates to the force of dull time

and placates its own release.

Death: which is as much its release

as its preserver; its tattered,

unromantic Shepard

the old man does not even know;

his youth as age eternal, hoary birth,

the opening of a code:

Time compressed

Into the screen

Today is rough

Another day unseen

What can speak the words of the

spirit, in a time without none?

When the only listening proceeds

from the dear and fragile –

The presence of others, which only

lives for a small moment,

For its being is finite. 

Poetry is not language but it is life

In it, I know that the manifest and

variegated appearance of things

Is a gift, and only that.

No one can speak the language

of the spirit without knowing this:

That it is not words but music,

That signals, cries, and loves

What is in truth nothing.