Our brief winter is buried in the warm
thawed earth now, I tell this to Hillary,
we were all a little befuddled there
on Broad Street.

The merchant told me that, when young,
she set her mind on living in a shack.
So she lived in a shack, in this our
teeming ghost state, and then she met
her husband.

I'm not going to send any love letters to
the void anymore, because
it doesn't seem to notice how pretty I am,
how pretty my living heart and medicine prose.
More fool me, every day.

The truth is that I drove up, past the
green quilt hills, the chalk-white Egret,
unhurried in the rice marsh, I drove right up
to this patch of quartz land to write a Great
Book.

And I did not write a great book,
but I'll drive home tomorrow