“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”

“Failing and Flying"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.It's the same when love comes to an end,or the marriage fails and people saythey knew it was a mistake, that everybodysaid it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anythingworth doing is worth doing badly.Like being there by that summer oceanon the other side of the island whilelove was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights thatanyone could tell you they would never last.Every morning she was asleep in my bedlike a visitation, the gentleness in herlike antelope standing in the dawn mist.Each afternoon I watched her coming backthrough the hot stony field after swimming,the sea light behind her and the huge skyon the other side of that. Listened to herwhile we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people whocame back from Provence (when it was Provence)and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,but just coming to the end of his triumph.”

“I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.”

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”

“Are the angels of her bed the angelswho come near me alone in mine?Are the green trees in her windowthe color is see in ripe plums?If she always sees backwardand upside down without knowing itwhat chance do we have? I am hauntedby the feeling that she is sayingmelting lords of death, avalanches,rivers and moments of passing through,And I am replying, "Yes, yes.Shoes and pudding.”

“We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.”

“You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday.What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant.Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko's deathwhen I cried every day among the trees. To the real.To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.”