And then the last of the short one is called "Night Journal."
In the last poem I'll read, its a little anaphora.
The word words, it's about words; and therefore
as a repeating motif.
Night Journal.
I think of Issa, a man of few words.
The world of dew is the world of dew.
And yet.
Three words contain all that we know for sure of the next life
or the last one.
Close your eyes.
Everything else is gossip, false mirrors, trick windows,
flashing light, Dutch glass in the undiminishable sun.
I write it down in visible ink, black words that disappear
when held up to the light.
I write it down not to remember, but to forget,
words like thousands of pieces of shot film exposed
to the sun.
I never see anything but the ground.
Everyone wants to tell his story.
The Chinese say we live in the world of the 10,000 things,
each of the 10,000 things crying out to us precisely nothing.
A silence whose tune we've come to understand,
words like birthmarks, embolic sunsets drying
behind the tongue.
If we were as eloquent, if what we
say could spread the good news the way the dogwood does,
its votive candles phosphorous and articulate
in the green haze of spring, surely something would hear us.
Even a chip of beauty is beauty intractable in the mind.
Words the color of wind moving across the fields there,
wind addled and wind sprung, abstracted as water glints.
The fields lion-colored and rope-colored
as in a picture of paradise, the bodies languishing
over the sky trailing their dark identities that
drift off and sieve away to the nothingness
behind them moving across the fields there
as words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.
Our words, like blown kisses, are
swallowed by ghosts along the way,
their destinations bereft in a rub of brightness unending.
How distant everything always is, and yet how close.
Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees,
birds sing an atonal row unsyncopated from tree
to tree, dew chants whose songs have
no words from tree to tree.
When night puts her dark lens in,
one on this limb, two others back there.
Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.
They start here, they finish here.
No matter how high they rise, my judgment
is that I know this and never love anything
hard enough that would stamp me and sink me suddenly
into bliss.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]