Driving this morning around the bend Where maples bronze the asphalt This time of the year, I saw

A young couple walking hand in hand, unhurried, Laughing, savoring each other’s heat – this heat Which makes certain plum trees bloom

Even in this cold. Those ghostwhite tipped Branches, bare otherwise, perhaps approximate The first blush of love, which may pass

Or deepen – this I shall not know – in that which Made Justin plaster every utility pole with A notice about his lost old dog, Smokey.

I don’t have the maps to this still unexplored Continent. So I blindly plunge into the downtown Canyons, shrouded in fog, letting this thought

Bind me to that couple, to Justin and his lost dog, And thus perhaps eventually arrive at that Final destination.

[1] In the gunmetal sky, a flash of quicksilver - A camera catching me walking on no man’s land Towards where perhaps lightning is different,

Towards where the gods are different, Towards where birds beading the telephone wires Are different, towards where I am different.

[2] Laughter is alike wherever one goes, However as a newspaper today reports Tears in those other places can be different – A girl’s eyes drop hard compact stones instead Of water

Lord, this fall day is done as other leaves fell over the sun.

The days are shortening their cloak of light is losing cubits of minutes.

Time lengthens here too, between this thought and the next as

a heron dives into itself giving me this line.

Grace, which the woods are thrusting out - red and gold

At their finger tips, is still hard for me to accept.

I continue to trash at the bank, inches away

from the sunlit lake afflicted by this folly of wanting

to absorb everything: geese, and their reflections floating above,

dusk sky dyeing it's clouds, a girl running in circles.

Prayer, counting beads on rosaries, fasting offer little respite

from such hungers - also add wanting to know what a half hidden tattoo

on a curved spine is to the above list - of being.

The only practise I continue to keep is this vigil at the horizontal bars

of an empty page, as dusk falls - it is getting darker - in what must be a strange insomaniac gratitude.