Jesus wrote in the sand.
I write in red notebooks. . . .

After grace and after rain,

1.
It is cold enough for rain
to coagulate & fall in heavy drops.
Tonight a skin of ice will grow

As a child I would awaken,
midsummer, cicadas buzzing
their alarm from oak trees whose

I am not at the crest of the world.
                                                      The moment 
is not the stylite’s pillar,

One could as well have chosen
that life of supermarket carts
junked in the backyard,

You would have to go down
into black earth like my father
gold light against shadow

I got this from a man on the street
in Richmond, circa 1964, who
offered me an easy job in his hotel

        As I ride my bicycle home from work at sunrise
a young fellow with an upturned collar asks me for my “spare change.”
He is friendly, as if we were classmates meeting in the schoolyard.

He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step

For some of us the only way of knowing we are here at all, going
across and going down,
exquisitely temporal though at no point believable; fragile; tragic.