One more skilled adventure—whatever

it is that fuels the stalled machine

and sends the pilot on his starry quest;

whatever it is they hope to find

out there—an emptiness, a stillborn

terror, but it is not love.

-John Haines, from NEAR Travels Far to Find Eros

The phoenix mourns by shaping, weighing, testing, hollowing, plugging and carrying towards the light.  He seems to take a clear view of necessity.  And…maybe he comes to see the immensity of the mechanism in which he is caught, the immense fragility of his own flying—composed as it is of these ceaselessly passing shadows carried backward by the very motion that devours them, his motion, his asking.

-Anne Carson, from Nox