Questions and Answers

My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us:

We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of

Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around.

For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths

When they are to express something unutterable.

But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a

Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations,

The boundless ones in moments of doubts.

If you have this affection for things that don't really matter to the poor,

Then everything will become clear, more coherent and somehow more

Conciliatory, not perhaps how I manage to function from day to day

Taking Kenneth's last words to be my daily gospel that "we must write

Every day," but in your innermost consciousness and wakefulness you will

Know I have patience with these black lines that I share with my most

Intimate friends to say I'm still writing to you.

So I sincerely beg you to have no remorse with matters of the heart,

For it is a foolish, overbearing organ that does not have a place to rest

Except in our sleep with dreams it cannot have during our times of

Playful awareness. I only seek, as well as I can, to serve the last

Wishes as a poet. What else is one to do with these unsolved hearts on

Paper? Otherwise they are of no use to anyone but the dreamer who tries

To cherish matters of the heart, like closed rooms to the public in some

Grand museum filled with treasure, or like books written in a strange

Tongue hidden in the library of moments we let slip away fearing it was

What we wanted from the beginning. We stopped searching for the

Answers because we could not live in their blue tents. It's a matter of

Living everything. Live now, and perhaps you will then gradually, without

Noticing it, one distant day live right into the answers of the heart.

8.3.03

Source: Incidents of Travel in Poetry (City Lights Books, 2015)