Nobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,Looking for something to give.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

So we found the end of our journey.So we stood, alive in the river of light,Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

Black was the without eyeBlack the within tongueBlack was the heartBlack the liver, black the lungsUnable to suck in lightBlack the blood in its loud tunnelBlack the bowels packed in furnaceBlack too the musclesStriving to pull out into the lightBlack the nerves, black the brainWith its tombed visionsBlack also the soul, the huge stammerOf the cry that, swelling, could notPronounce its sun.

In my position, the right witchdoctorMight have caught you in flight with his bare hands,Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,Godless, happy, quieted.I managedA wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.

But inside your sob-sodden KleenexAnd your Saturday night panics,Under your hair done this way and that way,Behind what looked like reboundsAnd the cascade of cries diminuendo,You were undeflected.You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfectAs through ether.

So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallenDream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,The other face, the real, staring upwards.