As if my mind's double-jointed
Sometimes, I have wanted
To bow my head & kiss

Weeks on my back, counting
stars not up there, cutting quick
close corners in the wheelchair

Ralph kept moving true as oil,
questions silent in my mouth
after hearing a ragged sound

That is where the coal ash is headed, not somewhere
but to you who are farther downstream
than me.

A cold rainy March morning came.
Two birds woke up and saw the sun
that comes up every morning

In the July hot smelly horse manure dust
out behind old man Mooney’s barn
that sits just at the outskirts of the town

Today is beautiful the birds singing
in the trees where they have landed or in the air when
they are going, the sun wrapping its fingers

These good New Yorkers bent low over books
deserve a Paradise of softer chairs
and sleep, their heads against that fringed and white

Crossing the land in a train, I passed through
the borderless townlets of sprawled New York
rising red brick out of nothing after

Through the veiled hush of the nut garden, God
was walking in the cool of the day; He
felt like talking again to a mortal

When I went up to Haworth there was peace
Between my teeth. An ordinary heart
Beat. My ordinary hands moved easily.