When everything has left you, at the end,
the world will come down to a few old words
you will see new because you’ve chosen to.
Your last breath will be like my first today.

So I start here, in that extremity—
or is it just simplicity I’ve earned
by learning to be, the page like a prayer,
a place to ask, to wait, and then to hear
such musics as I’ve never heard before?

Some might think I write about poetry.
There’s poetry here; it’s incidental.
I’m talking about the spaces in the soul
that correspond to what is there or not—
the not is in the sky I call heaven.
Heaven most mornings I choose to invent—