With eyes up-rais'd, as one inspir'd, Pale Melancholy sate retir'd, And from her wild sequester'd seat, In notes by distance made more sweet, Pour'd thro' the mellow horn her pensive soul.

By fairy hands their knell is rung; / By forms unseen their dirge is sung.

Here's to the wind blowing against this lighted houseand to the vast, windless spaces between the stars.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,I watch you diminish--my echo, my twin--and vanish around a curve in this whipof a road we can't help traveling together.

In unsettled times like these, when world cultures, countries and religions are facing off in violent confrontations, we could benefit from the reminder that storytelling is common to all civilizations. Whether in the form of a sprawling epic or a pointed ballad, the story is our most ancient method of making sense out of experience and of preserving the past.

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my windowin one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

Always mistrust a subordinate who never finds fault with his superior.

Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.

In a while, one of us will go up to bedand the other one will follow.Then we will slip below the surface of the nightinto miles of water, drifting down and downto the dark, soundless bottomuntil the weight of dreams pulls us lower still.