All night his window shines in the woods shadowed under the hills where the gray owl is hunting. He hears the woodmouse scream -- so small a sound in the great darkness entering his pain. For he is all and all of pain, attracting every new injury to be taken and borne as he must take and bear it. He is nothing; he is his admiration. So they seem almost to know -- the woodmouse and the roving owl, the woods and hills. All night they move around the stillness of the poet's light. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org |