this is the last week of our lives...

...in two thousand and five. no it's not. stop universalizing your suffering, you silly rabbit.

it is the first week of my lives, in two thousand and five, in which my camera is two hundred and fifty miles away from me.

so images will be made with words, have you not heard?

[Upon the Museum for the American Indian]

There is a hole at the top, a Sacred
Hoop for dreams to jump through, or more likely
the light of Sun and Men that washes out
humanity’s world like an oyster. It cries out
that it was ours before it was yours or mine,
and this is the form of the dome, the cupola
that molds roundly the noises that reach it.
It is a perfect nave of wooden tone, being carved
by children spinning happily on the stairs, or
by the footsteps of people sanding the grain
of its heart into smoothness. It is like a film,
a gritty dust falling into eyes, and it is always
in the air, between the words and the smells
that inhabit their cathedral.
From the balconies above one can
imagine a great toss of their own bodies
like great smiling gargoyles
thrown from the dizzying heights into
the life of falling, which glows
like a fire. It is amber, a warm interior, and
it is inviting. It is the children who are
laughing, while behind them the hands of
experience are ready to catch them,
hands that are dirtied with silence.