The cow pasture flooded and froze.
Over its milk glass rink, two crows
   drift to a pine,

catch like origami paper. Leafless
oak veins steam: auras lift
   an opaline

But it’s okay to wait, to try to find the right language and to find the right word. Because it isn’t enough to just transfer the pain of your body to the page: it has to be interesting, it has to beautiful, it has to do something for the audience or else it’s just secondhand pain.

Machado is so profoundly in control of silence that she has taught it its own language.

There’s nothing new under the Golden Star. If you did not exist
in my space/time coordinates, I would have invented you, spirited
from that Sunday afternoon in the Zócalo when you sang
your poems and I caught you afterwards at the lip of the stage