I choose the afternoon
we stood on the bridge
and dropped the leaves in the water
and the people who lived there beneath the bridge
lived in cardboard boxes
and lay on the stones there by the water
and the stones were red and warm
Noon is so barren
I can fill it with a bucket,
take mop
and go swashing
what remains
along the floorboards
I’m sure the habit of endangering everything you own and everything you are (a telephone pole repairman, say, or a Mickey Mouse criminal, the kind that boasts of having stolen things he couldn’t even lift) is one few of us would wish to break. If only we were so lucky as to know what it means to be in love that way and not think it a silly aberration.
once a book must have fallen
from the sky so large
the people could not see
where its pages
ended it was an open
field the people could walk
their eyes and forget what brought
them to the field