By the fifth day of rain
a few had begun to dance,
though not quite properly,

Not the kiss alone
      but an essence of kiss,
its dark matter left undisclosed

Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

And still there is no season's story told
by words, expressive, eager to explain;
no winter's tale will pass from mouth to mind;

Lillian Russell, I think of her standing
at the rail of the Niew Amsterdam as it sails
through Caracas to get a taste of the real slums

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

I’m singing a song for the romeos
I wore for ten years on my front stoop in the North Side,
and for the fat belly I carried

I am sitting thirty feet above the water
with my hand at my throat,
listening to the owls go through the maples

If you know about the Babylonian Jews
coming back to their stone houses in Jerusalem,
and if you know how Ben Franklin fretted

Some blossoms are so white and luscious, when they
hold their long thin hands up you strip them for love
and scatter them on the ground as you walk;