"Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.… - Sylvia Plath

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.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. 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.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?