Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

Need is not quite belief.

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.