i took a bus from new york city to boston 
and we were shrouded in snow the whole way.
coming from the south, snow always looks unreal to me.
like a movie set. or rather a window display at christmas. 

i tried to write but the scene seemed too big just then.
i didn’t know what i wanted and on long trips
i am happy not to know. 

maybe there is no world of undivided light
just the impossible forms we carry on our backs.
sometimes it feels like too much to ask of words.
much less people. 

then there was that poor sucker flaubert
rolling around on the floor for days in search of a perfect word
said dorothy parker. 

when i think of love i get tired.
i am more precious with my writing life than my life;
i am really quite unkind to myself.

once i was sitting in an airport terminal
and a moth fluttered at my feet.
i wondered how it got in, how it would get out.
what it thought of all those steel birds
wheeling about the tarmac.

i thought vaguely of virginia woolf,
her moments of being. that was a term
no one could adequately define for me.
as far as i could tell, it was some bright instant
where we pull back the wool of our lives
and, to use woolf’s own words,
we are the thing itself. 

animals gifted with wings
do not make distinctions
between moments of being & non-being.
yet i would not prefer their delicate lives.