Theresa used to come over every day. I’d be standing by the kitchen window and hear her cowboy boots on the walk. Then she would stand outside the door—I knew—listening for a sound inside, scratching the door with a twig, or reaching up to the handle to pull on it, softly, so no one would hear. 

You were twenty-eight this past week—all of you. One would think you'd be twenty-eight part by part-the way the sun rises over a landscape—instead of all at once.

Human bodies are different from one another
But their souls are all alike, filled with brilliant uses
Like airports.

1

The rain is speaking quietly,
you can sleep now.

You came one day and
as usual in such matters
significance filled everything—

Not smart to be out under trees with the wind still this
high: billowing & breaking bring down stob ends
of last year's drought-wood that died way up in the branches,

of cloud dispute
the sky of late afternoon,
the going sun suspended

wdn't it be silly to be serious, now:
I mean, the hardheads and the eggheads

are agreed that we are an absurd

My poems, if poems
other than casual
entrances into systems, are

I won't pretend I haven't ever cried; 
that would be rather foolish under the circumstances; 
I have been myself at times astonished