Writing at sundown

The science of daily life is improvisation; making it up as you go along. I more or less live this way, as if there's no other way to live. As long as I'm delving into myself with everything I have--and I know that's asking a lot--then I figure everything else will take care of itself. I make sure to shower myself with questions as there's nothing unimportant about a question, ever. That poet who said of younger poets after reading their poems: "I can't believe they're not more hungry to know themselves," I know what he means. So many of the poems I read now seem aimed in the other direction--even the good ones, sometimes especially the good ones--toward a purposeful misdirection, a place where there is no discernible self. A poem too can be made of stick figures, of something that looks enough like a poem to be called one. It's almost dark now. At dark I will disappear. Chateaubriand called poems, 'perfumes.' I can live with that.