To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it… - Mary Oliver

Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her — her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.