We Don't Know Our Own Story.

What Simone Weil Said Politics Has Meant All Along, Which Means That You Fight For 11 Percent, 12 Percent, 13 Percent, That You Avoid Golden-age Thinking And Romantic Melancholy And You Just Keep Pushing.

Where Politics Is Concerned, I Think Poets Have To Be Pragmatists, Philosophical Pragmatists.

Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

One May Prefer Spring And Summer To Autumn And Winter, But Preference Is Hardly To The Point. The Earth Turns, And We Live In The Grain Of Nature, Turning With It.