Nature

Bring authority to a reading of your poems? It would be poison to do so. The critics can't help themselves, of course. It is the nature of a grasping mind to think it is possessing and corralling. But where does the poison do its work? Your words remain the same.

From the woods, the shore, and the other side of death, you won’t have heard them anyway. But I had to run from the noise of their screams as they fought to climb up on top of your work to stamp their authority into what can bear no mark.

I'm not saying I found a better path. But I found one I preferred. I hope others do too. On my path, I got lost, all alone, and in that fearful ecstasy, I thought I could be saved.

Then I remembered the simple lesson to look and not to search.

Search and you will forever be "looking out for sorrow, slowing down for happiness" believing from inside that you’re "making all the right turns" to get to the doorway you want to walk through.

Searching shrouds the moment, blankets the pathway, urges you on towards what is inside you. Is there nothing here to look at other than ourselves?

Wouldn’t you have preferred to come down "to the thumping barriers of the sea"? In "Coming Home" you seem so content to walk through the doorway of your house in Provincetown with your partner. And I'm left thinking there is something about companionship I wish you had taught us but didn’t.

Your publisher said, you are "A private person by nature". Perhaps that was a clever pun. In the end, you gave us what you wanted to give us and not what we wanted. I’ll look at that and will not search.

There might be a flower growing and you won't have to pluck it. Just look and remember the clichés about velvet and fragility, about blood and ink, youth and time? Can a simple flower hold all these ideas?

Think a moment, how would you feel if you were that flower, looking out into the mirror of the world, and saw your human self as you are right now, reading, aging, complicating your life, rattling off your reasons for this and that, hating or admiring yourself, begrudging?

We’ve given so many clichés to flowers. Can they give us back ourselves in return?

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This room I visit never sleeps. It watches as I come to bed. It waits around me through the night. And when I wake and leave, it is there, silent and accepting, and will stay until I return.

Like every place we come to know, it is always ready. All places are a silent waiting for little lives to pass through, in routines, on journeys. They do not love, they do not care, but silently by being there, they let us know ourselves.

The room watches, so we know life a little better.