Suffice to say, the dream writer had a way of phrasing things. She could depict the curve of a cucumber, the shape of a sunbeam, the endearing, velvety tilt of a peach, in just such a way that she earned her living selling dreams. One simply made a selection, read it in solitude, and let it percolate till sleep. People swore they fell directly into her renderings, and one even asked if the dream writer could write a dream of dreaming forever. The dream writer could not do this, but she hired dream apprentices to expand the reach of her dreams and she wrote dreams for herself in which she would sit at a desk, pen in hand, and write even more dreams. This nearly doubled her output.

The little queen lived in a world where the sky swirled like the sea and nothing was itself for very long. Everything looked to be in brushstrokes.

Cutting down a wall, the wall sawyer could feel the tension in a home ease and something windy rush in circles round her feet. It was addictive, each a sweet victory of art. The tumbling motion of a falling wall was like a volcanic eruption fading into a mountain of roses. The wall sawyer felt a loving animosity toward walls. “You must pay attention to your obsessions, where life and love intersect,” she told the little queen.

Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.

I let quiet shape what I say, then realize there is nothing that can be fully said—the reason for gestures and eyes and art. Always something waiting, wanting, expectant, yet also curiously not.

Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.

I would like to do more in appreciating the mindset of the child. Maybe it has something to do with taking ourselves very seriously and with great disregard, as well as having a healthy does of awe and doubt for all else.

A word is a word is another word more beautiful because of the former and the next and the circle and sun they create.

Is it not so presumptuous to write a word? To write a word is to give the word a space all of its own. You build a home for it and hope it can find itself at home among all the other words. Nestled in a new place.

If I could simply place the various parts of myself into the night sky to occasionally glance up and behold myself—maybe in the end I am only hoping to vicariously soak up some starlight.

I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, and that language can hold a kind of sincerity that is tiresome and overwrought.

Whenever she felt at home, there always seemed to be love floating about on the edges of things.

Every once in a while, and it happens only several times a year if I am lucky, I will feel astonishment that I exist, that I am sitting, standing, perceiving, and that others perceive me...It is probably a good thing I am not always so aware of my existence because otherwise I would walk about in a haze of wonder embracing things.

I wonder how much space I take up, if a thought can take up secondary space.

The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.

The wall sawyer did not ask the little queen what she did. This was because in the little queen’s kingdom, people only volunteered their doings if they wanted to, and they never asked others their doings. It was considered impolite. Asking what one did was like asking who they were, and that was too simple a question for a very complex answer.

The little queen’s mother and father had said that she would live on, for a long time, and that her tears would magnify the life around her forever more, but they had not explained how she should go about going on.

I should think a poet president would be able to create a delectable confluence of various spaces. A poet is most political.

I recommend the French beret, for it gives the impression of just the right soft toughness, a veritable wave of sophisticated brain matter. It is the kind of hat that inspires a person to grow into it, to become the person they never knew they could be. The space between the top of the head and the beginnings of hat is among the most intimate of areas: earlobe behinds, elbow insides, and anuses. One must pay heed to such spaces for they hold a potential not fully known (but generally agreed to be vast).

Let us take our tongues and stick them out and waggle them in the wind. Let us walk, loving, let us walk and love, walking along, loving.

In this summer heat, I must remember that the realest things are the closest and farthest away, like the warmth found in winter: the heat hidden in the folds of one's coat, a lost floating breath, a kiss across the distance of zero degrees.

To believe in moments makes life endless, no?

Being in the country is like being in a dream—one doesn't quite know who one is. There is an anonymity to it all—that strange human creature that is me, one among all.