Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is the way it's always been: bad with large numbers. It is still moved by particularity. It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam, disclosing only random faces, while the rest go blindly by, unthought of, unpitied. Not even a Dante could have stopped that. So what do you do when you're not, even with all the muses on your side? Non omnis moriar--a premature worry. Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough? It never has been, and even less so now. I select by rejecting, for there's no other way, but what I reject, is more numerous, more dense, more intrusive than ever. At the cost of untold losses--a poem, a sigh. I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling. How much I am silent about I can't say. A mouse at the foot of mother mountain. Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand. My dreams--even they are not as populous as they should be. There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor. Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit. A single hand turns a knob. Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house. I run from the threshold down into the quiet valley seemingly no one's--an anachronism by now. Where does all this space still in me come from-- that I don't know.