Poems and their Music

How the Rainbow Works, by Al Young

2011-12-18T22:56:00.001-05:00

Johannes Brahms - Sonata No.3 D Minor, Allegro
with Itzhak Perlman, violin & Daniel Barenboim, piano

(for Jean Cook, on learning of her mother's death)

Mostly we occupy ocular zones, clinging
only to what we think we can see.
We can't see wind or waves of thought,
electrical fields or atoms dancing;
only what they do or make us believe.

Look on all of life as color -
vibratile movement, heart-centered,
from invisibility to the merely visible.
Never mind what happens when one of us dies.
Where were you before you even get born?
Where am I and all the unseeable souls
we love at this moment, or loathed
before birth? Where are we right now?

Everything that ever happened either
never did or always will with variations.
Let's put it another way: Nothing ever
happened that wasn't dreamed, that wasn't
sketched from the start with artful surprises.
Think of the dreamer as God, a painter,
a ham, to be sure, but a divine old master
whose medium is light and who sidesteps
tedium by leaving room both inside and outside
this picture for subjects and scenery to wing it.

Look on death as living color too: the dyeing
of fabric, submersion into a temporary sea,
a spectruming beyond the reach of sensual
range which, like time, is chained to change;
the strange notion that everything we've
ever done or been in until now is past
history, is gone away, is bleached, bereft,
perfect, leaving the scene clean to freshen
with pigment and space and leftover light.

from Soul Food, ed. by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2007)
as posted on panahala.net

[5], from Winter Love, by H.D.

2011-11-26T08:18:00.001-05:00

Franz von Vecsey (Vecsey Ferenc) - violinist and composer - Valse Triste

So we were together
though I did not think of you
for ten years;

it is more than ten years
and the long time after;
I was with you in Calypso's cave?

no, no - I had never heard of her,
but I remember the curve of honey-flower
on an old wall, I recall

the honey-flower as I saw it
or seemed to see it
for the first time,

its horn was longer, whiter -
what do I mean?
"bite clear the stem

and suck the honey out,"
a child companion or old grandam
taught me to suck honey

from the honey-flower;
what is Calypso's cave?
that is your grotto, your adventure;

how could I love again, ever?
repetition, repetition, Achilles, Paris, Menelaus?
but you are right, you are right,

there is something left over,
the first unsatisfied desire -
the first time, that first kiss,

the rough stones of a wall,
the fragrance of honey-flowers, the bees,
and how I would have fallen but for a voice,

calling through the brambles
and tangle of bay-berry
and rough broom,

Helen, Helen, come home;
there was a Helen before there was a War,
but who remembers her?

from Hermetic Definition (New Directions, 1972)

Words from the Front, by Ron Padgett

2011-10-29T15:24:00.003-04:00

Niccolò Paganini - Cantabile, with Leonid Kogan

We don’t look as young
as we used to
except in the dim light
especially in
the soft warmth of candlelight
when we say
in all sincerity
You’re so cute
and
You’re my cutie.
Imagine
two old people
behaving like this.
It’s enough
to make you happy.

poem from poets.org

A Gift, by Denise Levertov

2011-08-25T20:26:00.013-04:00

Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovksy - Souvenir D'un Lieu Cher, Meditation
with Miron Polyakin (violin)

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

from Sands of the Well (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1996)
via panhala.net

The Hawk, by Franz Wright

2011-08-25T20:25:00.002-04:00

Giacomo Puccini - "In questa reggia," from Turandot
with Joan Sutherland & London Philharmonic Orchestra (1972)

Maybe in a million years
a better form of human
being will come, happier
and more intelligent. A few already
have infiltrated this world and lived
to very much regret it,
I suppose.
Me,
I'd prefer to have come
in the form of that hawk, floating over
the mirroring fire
of Clearlake's
hill, my gold
skull filled with nothing
but God's will
the whole day through, instead
of these glinting voices incessantly
unerringly guiding me
to pursue
what makes me sick, and not
what makes me glad. And yet
I am changing: this three-pound lump
of sentient meat electrified
by hope and terror has learned to hear
His silence like the sun,
and sought to change!
And friends
on earth at the same time
as me, listen: from the sound of those crickets
last night, Rene Char said
prenatal life
must have been sweet -
each voice perhaps also a star
in that night
from which
this time
we won't be
interrupted anymore - but
fellow monsters while we are still here, for one minute, think
about this: there is someone right now who is looking
to you, not Him, for whatever
love still exists.

from God's Silence (Knopf, 2006)
posted at panhala.net

Ballad of the Poverties, by Adrienne Rich

2011-07-01T11:28:00.000-04:00

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64, Finale
with Leonard Bernstein

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There’s the poverty of theory poverty of the swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma mill the ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration
The poverty of the turned head, the averted eyes
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check the poverty of the dumpster dive
The poverty of the pawned horn the poverty of the smashed reading glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed-out on pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched-up to sell there
There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There’s the poverty of prescriptions who can afford
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can’t get to the poverty of the salary cut
There’s the poverty of human labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There’s the poverty of yard sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into: take it: it’s yours.

post inspiration from Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & Peacemaking
poem first appeared in Monthly Review
from Adrienne Rich's recent book Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)

Alpha Zulu, by Gary Copeland Lilley

2011-04-21T00:06:00.002-04:00

Tania León - Mistica (2003), with Adam Kent

I know more people dead than people alive,
my insomniac answer to self-addressed prayers

is that in the small hours even God drinks alone.
My self-portrait; gray locks in the beard, red eyes

burning back in the mirror, the truths of grooves
and nicks on my face, one missing tooth.

I'm a man who's gathered too many addresses,
too many goodbyes. There's not much money

or time left to keep on subtracting from my life.
Except for needs I can pack everything I have

into my old black sea-bag. To all the bloods
I'll raise a bourbon, plant my elbow on the bar

and drink to the odds that one more shot
won't have me wearing a suit of blues.

I'm so exposed, with you all of me is at risk,
and if that's only one side of being in love

that's the one deep down that proves it.
Here you are sleeping with me, narcotic as night,

naked as an open hand, and the skinny of it is,
what makes you think I am afraid of this

when I once lived in a cave, moss on the cold wall,
all my bones scattered across the floor.

from Alpha Zulu (Ausable Press, 2008)

I Have Walked a Long Time, by Sonia Sanchez

2011-03-07T16:49:00.001-05:00

George Antheil - Jazz Symphony

i have walked a long time
much longer than death that splinters
wid her innuendos.
my life, ah my alien life,
is like an echo of nostalgia
bringen blue screens to bury clouds
rinsen wite stones stretched among the sea.

you, man, will you remember me when i die?
will you stare and stain my death and say
i saw her dancen among swallows
far from the world's obscenities?
you, man, will you remember and cry?

and i have not loved.
always
while the body prowls
the soul catalogues each step;
while the unconscious unbridles feasts
the flesh knots toward the shore.
ah, i have not loved
wid legs stretched like stalks against sheets
wid stomachs drainen the piracy of oceans
wid mouths discarden the gelatin
to shake the sharp self.
i have walked by memory of others
between the blood night
and twilights
i have lived in tunnels
and fed the bloodless fish;
between the yellow rain
and ash,
i have heard the rattle
of my seed,
so time, like some pearl necklace embracen
a superior whore, converges
and the swift spider binds my breast.

you, man, will you remember me when i die?
will you stare and stain my death and say
i saw her applauden suns
far from the grandiose audience?
you, man, will you remember and cry?

poem from Homegirls and Handgrenades (White Pine Press, 2007)
poem also part of Full Moon of Sonia CD

Then, by Muriel Rukeyser

2011-02-06T23:24:00.003-05:00

Aleksandr Porfírievich Borodín - String Quartet No 2, III. Notturno: Andante
with Quartetto d´archi della Scala*

When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.

from A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, W.W. Norton & Co. (1995)
thank you Moles for the music

* Francesco Manara - Violin 1; Pierangelo Negri - Violin 2; Simonide Braconi - Viola; Massimo Polidori - Violoncello

Midnight Dip, by Don McKay

2011-01-23T19:50:00.001-05:00

Howard Shore - The Fellowship
from the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Whose dumb idea was this
anyhow? Silently
the chill air purges content and establishes
its interrogative. This is going to be
more dangerous than we supposed, wrapped
in our living room of beer and friendly conversation.
Moonlight
sheds itself along the path, madly
abandoned underwear.
What essence awaits us in the lake,
that lived inside our talk as easily
as bath and wash, now
sharpening to something like the afterlife of music moving in an
arc beyond the reaches of its melody?

from Camber: Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2004)

Still, by A. R. Ammons

2010-12-19T21:26:00.000-05:00

Georg Friedrich Händel - Oratorio - Messiah, HWV 56, Hallelujah Chorus
performed by The English Concert & Choir

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

from Selected Poems (2006)
thank you Roxana for the poem

What Great Grief Has Made the Empress Mute, by June Jordan

2010-12-01T23:02:00.001-05:00

Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck - Mélodie, from Orfeo ed Euridice
with Ginette Neveu, violin

dedicated to the Empress Michiko and to Janice Mirikitani

Because it was raining outside the palace
Because there was no rain in her vicinity

Because people kept asking her questions
Because nobody ever asked her anything

Because marriage robbed her of her mother
Because she lost her daughters to the same tradition

Because her son laughed when she opened her mouth
Because he never delighted in anything she said

Because romance carried the rose inside a fist
Because she hungered for the fragrance of the rose

Because the jewels of her life did not belong to her
Because the glow of gold and silk disguised her soul
Because nothing she could say could change the melted
music of her space
Because the privilege of her misery was something she could
not disgrace
Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief
Because her grief required no imagination
Because it was raining outside the palace
Because there was no rain in her vicinity

poem from afropoets.net

Imagining you’d come to say goodbye..., by Jennifer Reeser

2010-10-22T17:29:00.000-04:00

Johann Sebastian Bach - Cello Suite No. 2 Sarabande
with Winona Zelenka, Toronto 2010

Imagining you’d come to say goodbye,
I made a doll of raffia and string.
I gave her thatch hair, and a broomstick skirt
of patchwork satin rags. Around each eye
I stitched thick lashes. Such a touching thing
she was! That even you could not debate –
impassive, undemanding and inert.
Yes, surely she’d cause you yourself to sigh.
Around her breast, I sewed a loden ring
to guard her cotton heart from being hurt,
then sat down in the fabric scraps to wait,
between the rafters and the furnace grate,
needle in hand, and never so aware
no craft on earth is master to despair.

poem from famouspoetsandpoems.com

Sympathetic Vibration, by Moya Cannon

2010-10-06T17:49:00.001-04:00

Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35, III
with David Oistrakh

for Kathleen

'You never strike a note,
you always take the note.'

Did it take her many
of her eighty quiet passionate years
to earn that knowledge,
or was it given?

Music, the dark tender secret of it,
is locked into the wood of every tree.
Yearly it betrays its presence
in minute fistfuls of uncrumpling green.

No stroke or blade can release the music
which is salve to ease the world's wounds,
which tells and, modulating, retells
the story of our own groping roots,
of the deep sky from which they retreat
and, in retreating, reach -
the tree's great symphony of leaf.

No stroke or blade can bring us that release
but sometimes, where wildness has not been stilled,
hands, informed by years of patient love,
can come to know the hidden rhythms of the wood,
can touch bow to gut
and take the note,
as the heart yields and yields
and sings.

from Carrying the Songs (Carcanet, 2007)

This Sadness, by Susan Goyette

2010-09-11T01:44:00.004-04:00

Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky - Pezzo Capriccioso
with Mstislav Rostropovich

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
and tire my useless sadness.
- Anna Akhmatova

If I could change this sadness,
learn the touch of a potter,
I'd coax it into a thing of beauty,
something serviceable.

I imagine throwing it, wrapped in burlap,
into the harbour. Some unwanted cat
that will haunt me, one of its lives
as my grandmother, with fingers like pine roots
dropping dead needles into my eyes,
in another as my father with his hair on fire
and his steel-wool tongue.

But it's an alluring sadness
that calls with the wordless song of a child
and fills these nights with all the names
I can give to it.

from The True Names of Birds (Brick Books, 2000)

What Music, by Joy Harjo

2010-08-29T21:08:00.003-04:00

Dmitri Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107, II. Moderato
with Mstislav Rostropovich (1959)

... ...I would have loved you then, in
the hot, moist tropics of your young womanhood.
Then
... ...the stars were out and fat every night.
They remembered your name
.............................................and called to you
as you bent down in the doorway of the whiteman's houses.
You savored each story they told you,
and remembered
...........................the way the stars entered your blood
...................................................................................at birth.
Maybe it was the Christians' language
.........................................................that captured you,
or the bones that cracked in your heart each time
you missed the aboriginal music that you were.
But then,
.............you were the survivor of the births
of your two sons. The oldest one hates you, and the other
wants to marry you. Now they live in another language
in Los Angeles
......................with their wives.
And you,
..............the stars return every night to call you back.
They have followed your escape
.....................from the southern hemisphere
.................................................................into the north.
Their voices echo out from your blood and you drink
the Christians' brandy and fall back into
.........doorways in an odd moonlight.
................................................You sweat in the winter in the north,
and you are afraid,
........................... sweetheart.

M'Girl at Rhizome Cafe, Vancouver BC Coast Salish Territory, June 20 2009

poem from She Had Some Horses (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983)

Changing What We Mean, by Eloise Klein Healy

2010-07-17T00:04:00.000-04:00

Richard Wagner - Walkürenritt, from Die Walküre, Act III
Conducted by Leopold Stokowski

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new.
You redirect the conversation. A man
has entered it. Your therapist has given you
permission to discuss this with me, the word
you’ve been looking for in desire.
You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean

different things when we say it. I mean
the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new
beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire
to enter the world with a man
instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word
you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you

who have children to think of, you
who have put me in line behind them and mean
to keep the order clear. It’s really my word
against yours anymore in this new
language, in this battle over how a man
is about to enter this closed room of desire

we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire
isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you
say to me. Instead I learn a man
can protect you in a way a woman only means
to but never can, and my world is too new
when there’s real life out there, word

after word for how normal looks, each word
cutting like scissors a profile of desire—
a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new
or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you
and the world simultaneously, say what I mean
with my body, my choice to not be a man,

to be a woman with you, forget the man’s
part or how his body is the word
for what touch can contain, what love means.
If this were only about desire,
you say, I’d still desire you.
But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new

consequences emerge when a man and desire
are part of the words we hurl, you
changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.

poem from Poetry Foundation

remote

2010-07-07T20:52:00.002-04:00

Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata in E major Op. 109, III with Lívia Rév

if it wasn't for               your              fin - gers

whis - per - ing              the lost voice

i               wouldn't know              i               am trapped

between a me              i               forgot

and               one               living in the world

              without                             voice

When I Am Among the Trees, by Mary Oliver

2010-06-20T10:21:00.000-04:00

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, II

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

in Thirst, 2007

Afterwards, by Thomas Hardy

2010-05-31T02:50:00.001-04:00

Johann Sebastian Bach - Sonata for Violin solo No 1, G minor, BWV 1001, I. Adagio
with Yehudi Menuhin, violin (recorded 1935)

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?

from BBC Poetry

Feeling Sorry for Myself, by Charles Harper Webb

2010-05-19T11:25:00.001-04:00

from Le Corsaire, with Rudolf Nureyev

I start with a groan, swelling to a moan,
rising to a keen, ascending
to a shriek that tapers off in a thin wail.
I hug myself and, whimpering,
rock back and forth on my heels.
No one has ever known such sadness.
No one can grasp how I feel.

I smash an egg over each eye.
I smear my face with coal and pepper.
I wear a paper bag soaked through
with spoiled watermelon and pork grease.
I shred my happy past - my books,
pictures, and poems, published or not.
I'll never fly fish again.

I'll never make love again.
I'll never sit outside and watch night
stretch its starry tent over the sky.
There will be no more metaphors.
I am more sorrowful than a sorrowing man.
Life has no more meaning to me
than a life without meaning.

My heart slows. My blood congeals
to brown, vein-clogging mush.
My stomach goes on strike; my colon
bars its door. People assume
I'm terminal. They imagine what
would make them feel the way I look,
and project their paltry problems onto me.

As if they could fathom my misery
by waterwinging over its abyss!
My pain is too heavy to lift,
too vast to measure, too ineffable to name,
and incalculably too precious to share.
I dig my grave in a landfill, and topple in.
I rub dirt and dog droppings in my hair.

I've sunk so low its funny; so I start to giggle.
Then to chortle. Then to roar. Mothers
clutch their bleating kids, and rush away.
Gangbangers dash to the far side of the street.
I crawl out of my grave, strip, and shower
with a gunk-filled water hose.
I shake and shiver, grinning, in the filthy air.

from Tulip farms and leper colonies: poems
as posted on panhala.net

The victorious soldier

2010-04-27T21:25:00.001-04:00

Giuseppe Verdi - "Celeste Aida," from Aida
with Placido Domingo

I wish I could bead bracelets
to adorn the wrists of parents
who never sent their sons to war,
who think wars fall outside of
the realms of last resort,
those who put indomitable
wedges of compassion
into the violent monolith -
I wish my self was bowing
to them instead of throwing up
this permanently closed fist
of bare, bloody victory.

Terra Incognita: Poems, by Heinz Piontek

2010-04-02T03:42:00.001-04:00

Claude Debussy - "Reflets dans l'eau" in D-flat major from Images Book 1
with Arturo Michelangeli

Here
still a blank patch
and I, the native.

Here
are printed letters
my footprints.

Behind
deleted words
I lurk.

Retrieve
me with your gaze
into the inhabited world.

from Selected Poems
translated from German by Ewald Osers

thank you vv for the music

i am a little church(no great cathedral), by e.e. cummings

2010-02-28T09:07:00.001-05:00

Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Major Op.44
with Tatiana Nikolayeva

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

Night walk, by Franz Wright

2010-01-31T04:10:00.001-05:00

Frederic Chopin - Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1
with Valentina Igoshina

The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to but a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper --
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

from God's Silence: Poems