“BAD PEOPLEA man told me once that all the bad peopleWere needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernailsYou need; they are really claws, and we knowClaws. The sharks—what about them?They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced menIn black coats who chase you for hoursIn dreams—that’s the only way to get youTo the shore. Sometimes those hard womenWho abandon you get you to say, “You.”A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takesA lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.Then they blow across three or four States.This man told me that things work together.Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;And a careless god—who refuses to let peopleEat from the Tree of Knowledge—can leadTo books, and eventually to us. We writePoems with lies in them, but they help a little.”

“A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takesA lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.”

“IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE INI have been thinking about the man who gives in.Have you heard about him? In this storyA twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small windAnd the pine bends all the way over to the ground.I was persuaded,” the pine says. “It was convincing.”A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agreesTo drown all her children. “What could I do?”The cat said. “The mouse needed that.”It’s strange. I’ve heard that some people conspireIn their own ruin. A fool says, “You don’tDeserve to live.” The man says, “I’ll string this ropeOver that branch, maybe you can find a box.”The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,I need twenty thousand corpses.” “Tell you what,”The General says, “we have an extra battalionOver there on the hill. We don’t need all these men.”

“What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.”

“Early Morning in Your RoomIt's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-likeCoffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.The gray light as you pour gleaming water--It seems you've traveled years to get here.Finally you deserve a house. If not deserveIt, have it; no one can get you out. MiseryHad its way, poverty, no money at least.Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter to his Father, are all here. You can danceWith only one leg, and see the snowflake fallingWith only one eye. Even the blind manCan see. That's what they say. If you hadA sad childhood, so what? When Robert BurtonSaid he was melancholy, he meant he was home.”

“Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.”

“THE FACE IN THE TOYOTASuppose you see a face in a ToyotaOne day, and you fall in love with that face,And it is Her, and the world rushes byLike dust blown down a Montana street.And you fall upward into some deep hole,And you can’t tell God from a grain of sand.And your life is changed, except that now youOverlook even more than you did before;And these ignored things come to bury you,And you are crushed, and your parentsCan’t help anymore, and the woman in the ToyotaBecomes a part of the world that you don’t see.And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,And you stand on some mountain road weeping.”