From the dark of the couch, we watched wind part the curtains. The sunlight invaded our silences as the beer thinned, and motes etched the gold light and faded. Fish Poem Fish loomed randomly, stark sleek and teasingly near; stately zeppelins, snug in the dark, then bolts of fear. They were happiness to me, these glinting, infirm beautiful things. First impaling, then dropping my worm, I watched for expanding and weakening rings. But each catch brought regret: a tossed-back fish gasping by scum slathered beams, fins barely whispering, soon to wash up on the beach… …what violence I do to my dreams because I can’t let them hover beautifully, just out of reach. Translated from Die Sonette an Orpheus by Ranier Maria Rilke Everything’s threatened, now that the machine wants to be existent in spirit, and no longer merely in fact. It cuts the stone cleaner for starker building so the master hand's lovely vibrations no longer distract. It never holds back, for fear that we might once avoid it. Self-oiling in its still factory, it's self-possessed. It is life: it knows it’s ordered and shaped and destroyed it, as surely as it believes it will always know best. Nonetheless, being to us is enchanted, beginning hundreds of places in plays the pure powers set spinning, none wander up to without kneeling down to in shock. Words still go tenderly round its ineffable grace.... And music, ever new, builds, out of trembling rock, a God-inhabited house in superfluous space.

Above Dubrovnik Above Dubrovnik is a man who sells bird whistles. And he whistles them all day. Behind his leather jacket, sanguine clay roofs and their laundry lines, his family dwells, and every street stone’s polish marks the sway of seven centuries’ passing, to church bells. The prospect of the ringing wall impels the tourists to troop past him, and they pay him for the story his appearance tells; of someone who’s successful, in his way. He works between the Adriatic’s shells and the time-polished city, come what may. Above Dubrovnik is a man who sells bird whistles. And he whistles them all day. Linger She ran illustrating the way you should run; you float on, remaining aloft until one uncoiling leg springs you back into the air. Fly forward, pass through and flow. Linger there.