It’s getting harder to remember the Thirties. 
Public gestures are so replacing private embraces 
That, thinking back, I can visualize old Cactus Jack 
Gamer better than some of the sunburned faces

Of girls I once thought I wanted to marry. 
It’s all very sad, this furious emptying 
Of musty privacy which will finally leave 
Only tundras of starlit history.

I can say: “We stood this way on some day.”
But which of three hundred and sixty-five? 
Summer or winter? Mostly, I can’t remember— 
I can remember we were very much alive

One winter when all West Tennessee was glazed 
With ice that crystalled the trees and caked the roofs. 
Gullies in the creeks grew wider that year