Time passed, turning everything to ice. Under the ice, the future stirred. If you fell into it, you died. It was a time of waiting, of suspended action. I lived in the present, which was that part of the future you could see. The past floated above my head, like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable. It was a time governed by contradictions, as in I felt nothing and I was afraid.

Watching you stare into space in the tidy rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly working hard while actually doing the worst job possible, I think you are a small irritating purple thing and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth because you are all that's wrong with my life and I need you and I claim you.

Look at her, touching his cheek to make a truce, her fingers cool with spring rain; in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus— even here, even at the beginning of love, her hand leaving his face makes an image of departure and they think they are free to overlook this sadness.

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.

Gretel in Darkness: This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead are dead. I hear the witch's cry break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards. Her tongue shrivels into gas.... Now, far from women's arms And memory of women, in our father's hut we sleep, are never hungry. Why do I not forget? My father bars the door, bars harm from this house, and it is years. No one remembers. Even you, my brother, summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant to leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you. I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln-- Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there. Am I alone? Spies hiss in the stillness, Hansel we are there still, and it is real, real, that black forest, and the fire in earnest.