Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy, Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality And a yard short of not long to live. Better to sit dow… - Charles Wright

If you don’t shine you are darkness.

from “Tomorrow

A moment that should have lasted forever and forever
Long over — it came and went before I knew it existed.
I think I know what it means,
But every time I start to explain it, I forget the words.

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.