Sandals are the youth of a shoe
And the memory of its trek to the desert.

You had a laughter of grapes:
many round green laughs.

In his next incarnation he’ll be a sword: the hurt will re-
      main.

Harassed with inquiry, I
waited up by a scale-flaked
boulder in a willow glen,

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

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

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

May we tinker with nature, define &
adopt, adjust her procedures, till
we can make a nature