If you had sensational love,
what would you feel?
Certainly my heart
would be in the realms of glory
with the great mind of Divine.

I was hoping to be happy by seventeen.
School was a sharp check mark in the roll book,
An obnoxious tube playing at noon…

First I forgot your voice, then the photo you gave me.
When a leaf fell I no longer
Thought of you, shy and wordless, in a raked yard.
I no longer saw you as
The dark girl among trees,
At the entrance to a story for which
The end was always marriage and a bright car.
Your voice never came back; at night
I was left to my nonsense and a typewriter
That couldn’t get things right.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

The eyelids glowing, some chill morning.
O world half-known through opening, twilit lids
Before the vague face clenches into light;
O universal waters like a cloud,
Like those first clouds of half-created matter;
O all things rising, rising like the fumes

In spatter of spring shade and sun,
I spread my grandfather’s death
on his picnic table, his keys, notes
on cars he owned, travels he made,
repair kits for everything, an aerial
map of the Chesapeake Bay.

They hawk the yard, heaving big beaks,
laborers with picks, hoes, mattocks,
black all over them the formal suits
something has taught them to hang up
in bright air, brushed to sleekest shine,
and worn with the insouciance of rakes.