Jeg lurer på hvor mange i denne byen
som bor i et møblert værelse.
Når jeg stirrer på bygningene om natten
tør jeg banne på at jeg i hvert vindu ser et ansikt
som stirrer tilbake på meg,
og når jeg snur meg
lurer jeg på hvor mange som går tilbake til skrivebordet
for å skrive dette ned.

Jeg prøvde å sove
men når jeg ikke fikk sove
lærte jeg å skrive
Jeg lærte å skrive
sånt som kunne bli lest
i netter som denne
av en som meg

Jeg går gjennom det gamle gule solskinnet
for å nå kjøkkenbordet mitt
Diktet om meg
ligger der sammen med bøkene
hvor jeg nevnes
blant de døde og kommende Dylan-er

There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Ah remember me, I used to live for music
Remember me, I brought your groceries in
Well it's Father's Day and everybody's wounded
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Do not arrange your bright flesh in the sun
Or shine your limbs, my love, towards this height
Where basket men and the lame must run, must run
And grasp at angels in their lovely flight

With stumps and hooks and artificial skin.
O there is nothing in your body's light
To grow us wings or teach the discipline
Which starvers know to calm the appetite.

Understand we must be content to beg
The clinic of your tighs against the night
Were there no scars of braces on his leg
Who sings and wrestles with them in our sight,

Then climbs the sky, a lover in their band.
Tell him your warmth, show him your gleaming hand.

You have no form, you move among, yet do
not move, the relics of exhausted thought
of which you are not made, but which give world to
you, who are of nothing made, nothing wrought.
There you long for one who is not me, O
queen of no subject, newer than the morning,
more antique than first seed dropped below
the wash where you are called and Adam born.
And here, not your essence, not your absence
weds the emptiness which is never me,
though these motions and these formless events
are preparations for humanity,
and I get up to love and eat and kill
not by my own, but by our married will.

Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed
Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams
In another lifetime she must have owned the world or been faithfully wed
To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams