Happy 15th Anniversary my Love!  Take it away Pablo . . . ______ Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because — because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep. Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart. Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the

From the door sill of a dream they called my name… It was the good voice, the voice I loved so much. “-Listen,” said the voice. “Will you go with me to visit the soul?…” And a soft stroke reached up and touched my heart. “With you always” … And in my dream I walked Down a long and solitary corridor, Aware of the touching of the pure robe, And the soft beating of blood in the hand that loved me. -Antonio Machado, from Times Alone: Selected Poetry of Antonio Machado (edited by Robert Bly)

Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and

The last wolf hurried toward me through the ruined city and I heard his baying echoes down the steep smashed warrens of Montgomery Street and past the few ruby-crowned highrises left standing their lighted elevators useless Passing the flicking red and green of traffic signals baying his way eastward in the mystery of his wild loping gait closer the sounds in the deadly night through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks I heard his voice ascending the hill and at last his low whine as he came floor by empty floor to the room where I sat in my narrow