Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.

All I ask the haters--and I, too, am one--is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

Tonight I see no spheres, but project myselfand gaze back, an important trick because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,shuttling between the you and I.

Possessing a weapon has made me bashful.Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure.The ether of data engulfs the capitol.Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful.My oboe tars her cenotaph.The surface is in process.Coruscant skinks emerge in force.The moon spits on a copse of spruce.Plausible opposites stir in the brush.Jupiter spins in its ruts.The wind extends its every courtesy.I have never been here.Understand?You have never seen me.