I spent part of the afternoon with a downy woodpecker.

I had a dream about two secret words. I held their names on my lips when I woke, but a waking word entered my mouth and I lost the secret words. They meant, During wars, the only ones left in this small town are the unemployed, and they sounded a little bit like okey-dokey.

There is a seam in the sky where a backgrounded opacity meets a foregrounded opacity. We have been painted in.

The female cardinal is neon in this light.

I caught my dream words this morning before they leapt from my tongue: I am hunting words through an increasingly gentle forest that opens onto a faceless marsh of mallow. Stop, please. Language, stop me. Stop until words make me hungry again. Then I’ll eat them like durian, treaded skins and all.

Every day I live with this illness is a day for me to take stock. That is how my illness is the gift I never fathomed it could be.

This season, I have a favorite chipmunk. I should love them all equally, but only one is my darling.

My words from three dreams ago swam back to me last night, the ones I lost on waking but that reminded me of okey-dokey. The words are “ini k’ani.” I looked them up, and both are Asomtavruli letters used to write in the Georgian language. Ini is the equivalent of an English short “i,” as in “hit.” K’ani is the equivalent of an English “k,” but glottalized. Who knows why I would dream these sounds at all, let alone on two different nights.

Musical instruments have humble bodies, yet their voices are bold.

When did the poetry community become a bare knuckle boxing ring?

Visions are what happens when the mind is ever so slightly batted away from its cultural trappings, when certain centers flash that are typically dull and systematically made duller by the very culture that produces and sustains it. But the visions are still steeped in the culture in which the mind lives. They are not free from it, though traces of free thought can be made out, like the echo of a long overgrown trail within dense forest. As a friend says, visions are “trances and traces.”

Tra(n)ces.

Living and dying are not two things. They are one thing. They sit side by side, as intimate as young lovers.

Moments after the samara wheels to earth, it stands upright, like a ballerina doing a revelé, poised to tunnel the soil with its gaunt root.

Death is kneeing life in the groin today.

Sentences make words feel like they have friends.

My darling chipmunk is staring into a puddle as if it were a reflecting pool.

Some people spend their whole lives polishing a lump of coal, convinced they’ve gotten hold of a diamond.

The whole point of living in Kansas is to be lost in the world and to lose the world.

There is definitely more to life than poetry acceptances. For instance, there’s poetry.

Sometimes there’s not much bridge left to burn. Better to let the elements deal with what remains.

When you continue to speak despite the fact that nobody is listening, you must be saying something that is either of no importance or of grave importance.

I am not the world’s ornamentation.

Maxine Kumin says Anne Sexton lived a year longer than she would have otherwise because a priest told her something that kept her going: God is in your typewriter.

The first bird of spring has emerged, but it does not sing. It screams.

I have work to do. I can’t be bothered by small fish who want to rub against my ankles to irritate me or to pleasure themselves.

The buds on the trees are a form of pointillism.

I think I’ll change my first name to an open parenthesis and my last name to a closed parenthesis. My middle name will be empty space.

My body is like a barn left to the field.

If I were an animal, I would crawl off to die on days when my body feels like this. Then I would start to feel better and come crawling toward you. I would be the one with detritus hitching a ride on my flanks. Everything wants to make its way back to the living, even rubble and scraps.

I filled Easter eggs with lines from my favorite poems and hid them at my alma mater with the help of a dear friend. I did this because poetry is action and poetry is love.