Eddie, you said you forgot about insanity & death
when you were at the beach. ‘From Beer To Eternity’
was as serious as you could take it.

Jesus wrote in the sand.
I write in red notebooks. . . .

After grace and after rain,

                Tell her you’ll do anything to keep her.
The red dress twisted under her is the last of
her mother’s history. You want to keep her

1.
It is cold enough for rain
to coagulate & fall in heavy drops.
Tonight a skin of ice will grow

As a child I would awaken,
midsummer, cicadas buzzing
their alarm from oak trees whose

That far rise drifting in its first mute buds
Brightens and freezes through binoculars,
Shadeless grain of the giver. As if grown

I am not at the crest of the world.
                                                      The moment 
is not the stylite’s pillar,

Where the gale winds blew they crouched low
where too much horizon leered they fashioned a circle
and drew its boundaries tight

You can only have a lot of power,
never enough:
the strength to lift

One could as well have chosen
that life of supermarket carts
junked in the backyard,