"We're the only things - leaving religion out of it - we're the only things that know spring is coming" - Jack Gilbert in an interview with Sarah Fay, in The Paris Review

At 10, no thought of mortality yet. His face, uncreased and drenched with talcum powder, flash frozen - how bleary eyed that halogen brightness made him, in black and white, and forgotten in an yellowing album, which no one looks at much anymore, in a far away homeland.

At 20, a night of drunken delight in energy. And chafing at the lines that kept him from Dutch paintings lining the walls of museums in foreign cities, nearly all facing, inwards or outwards,the sea. Also, being unacquainted with the stigmata that is being anointed by a woman's wetness.

Now at a itinerant 30, loved moderately (by few, here and there, and vice-versa), he stands in the woven shadow of a red bud tree in the first flush of spring (the color a woman turns if only one knows how to touch her), and prays for a few more miles, in the course of which he can learn how to, fully, accept gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world, and to bring news back from that distance to this mile.

March 7, 2008; on turning thirty in a Southern spring