1.Dear shush of oceans, page after page, youwho make me feel more fortunate and small,I too am setting out, my eye lit upto the horizon with all that never arrives.I eat my books with a hunger that rivalsthe sadness of monsters in books.  I am nowherewithout them: the beasts who never die.They gnaw at me like oceans at the shore.Dear ocean wave, I am reading your letterthe letter I am reading.  The shore advances.The shore retreats.  Our breath is everywhere.Perhaps I would be more full of monstersif not for songs that make them bearable.Or books that spill the blood they would conceal.2.To be one is odd, and one over onestill one, cold as the numbers ledgereddown the long column of last effects.And it takes a little cold beauty to thinka violence reducible to what it means.A knife as particular, it is silent, swift,stubborn as the rock the philosopher kicksin defiance of world as slumber and idea.Cruelty has a face.  It has the neighborwindow to mirror ours before we vanish.But murder is schooled in years of evasionof one’s pain and the faces it lays bare.It is cold as light the neighbor findsshameless, sexless.  A sharper way to read.3.About now the monsters grow more lovelyand why not.  Why suffer the transfusionof our blood into their bodies on high.All the tension in the banter has cometo this, to the moment that draws the couplecloser with the violence of a new song.About now the monsters walk among usas dolls and children and the great night sky,stars that pin our stories to the dark.And if the star looks a little anguishedat the moment of union, it is not instinctas the thoughtless know it, but one that tearsloose of thought, or blossoms into cries,hearts leaping in one wilderness, like deer.4.When I was young, I knew there were ideasthat laid their faces on the face of night.I felt the cataract of daylight fallinginto privacies of sleep.  One enormouswilderness, so long as we are sleeping.I knew this, as dream sometimes knowsit is dreaming, when the knowledge is notdream alone.  Some nights blur into onenight, one long rehearsal for retirement.No doubt I want more choices at that hour,in reveries more odd than liberated.Dear Reader, I have not forsaken you,the idea of you, for the rule of languagewe break now like glow sticks in the dark.5.Together is darker than the word that takesits place.  To cast a shadow over the pageyou read, over the body you lie against,it makes understanding more personal,in ways that instinct or the known aloneis not.  Instinct that is water fallinginto water.  Or so we understandwhen reflection calls the falling ours.I chime a spoon of meat into a bowlin the morning and my one cat makesthe sound of sneakers in the gym.  Thenher sweet plea disappearing in the bowl.Instinct that is the star consumed at dawn,the pretext of our silence.  More deep than long.6.The small death, it becomes us.  It becomes,in time, our great absorption into no thing.You with your mouth, me with my echo there,there, we are giving in to space between us.The small death between lovers in a carparked at the edge of shore, it empties them.Death as the blossom drawn through the eyeof the vase, through the clear black glass.It holds so little in its grasp, the zeroof the cathedral rose that holds us to it.Why we call it ours is anyone’s guess:the death that names our life before a life.My first word was a figure against a ground.  And in it: you.  The hunted, wanted, feared.7.Somewhere the chime in the morning bowlcalls the animal to what it does notunderstand.  And yet it reads.  It eats.  It hears the light of dawn break like bread.Long ago, when my friend was gone,I fed his cats.  I watched them grow moreand more excited to see me in the morning.  Not me as some deep recess to explore,the word-closet who thinks of them in closets.  But as emergent: the emergency colorof one of many blooms a bee might choose.That hum of the swarm selects.  It findsthe better fields of the many and turnsthem into honey.  Thus the language of bees.8.Thus these bees as readers in a libraryof illuminated books.  Not quite friends,though as I read, the books I love feelmore as I feel, their pages worn darkalong the margins, their illustrations burnedin me, like roses in a patch of snow.I give my face to them, to the colorthey return to letters and all who write them.Take this book of hours I am readingas we speak, these winter scenes radiantas midnight diners.  When I close its cover,I continue to hold a lantern in the darkinstinctual fire that melds: word to world,heaven to earth.  Sweet animal to bowl.9.I choose to remember days that choose mein return.  Take this hour, this gardenerin a book of prayers.  Take the blueof winter, figured against the lifeless ground.Dear memory, who if not you inventsa language, deep in the bodies of others.Who makes some sense of ours.  The rain that falls(though the hole of one particular sky)it just might reach us long after storm.It just might be a child of experiencethat drizzles in shadows into pools of light.No task at hand to change this.  No summonsof collective praise or lack of praise.No wound washed clean in the blood of seeing.10.The ghost-face of what we suffer liesacross the glass between us.  Who am Ito strike my eye from the eye I strike,to strike the words I feel ashamed of.Stranger, have you been there all along.Hard for me to imagine otherwiseand still have things I need to discuss.Ink dries.  Then it welters in the eye.Lamplight needles and threads the pearls of rain.At least this is the hope.  The lantern heldby the dark incisions of ink on white.Always more, says the skeptic hope.Like despair that way.  The desirethat learns it cannot, must not, be desired.11.Always more, say the afterlives of twoin the dark.  Always more, the smokethey blow through a quietude of words.And in the dome above them, the starsthat care for no one.  It makes them sharpas jewels, their lives small and fortunate.Not that desire needs to die to make itlight.  But there is always more around it.More, says the boy at meditationwhose prospect of arrival must be hopeless.More, my friend once said to himselfand so he drowned himself in wine.  His bodyan empty bottle he emptied bottles into.As if to complete the circle.  And close.12.More, says the character who transfersstones from pocket to pocket, findingcomfort in the recursive machineryof progress.  More, says the artificialfriend who, in death, is more of the same.Just listen to the clock at the far endof the conference table.  The broken handinside that twitches, audibly, in place.Numbers alone are literal, it says,alone in the dull pastorals of phonebooks.All we like sheep.  Numbers alone.Sweet autistics of the sign kingdom.They play a music with no music in it.Only a description, an effigy, a stone.