Status Updates From Before the First Word: The ...

Among the other things
it could be named
this too is love, the kind
I'm most familiar with--
the weight I claim
I cannot bear and do,
and do.

...
it is their brokenness
you long to touch, the parts
they left behind or lost
as they learned too soon
too many years ago
what it took and took
to be a man.

Because we are mostly
made of water and water
calls to water
like the ocean to the river,
the river to the stream,
there was a time when
children fell into wells
...
and water calls to water
through centuries of reason

Or he'd have been racing his speedboat
at Duncaren Dam, the waves
lifting him and banging him down,
a violence he could understand,
that same dumb force raging inside him.

but there was too little room
for life without end,
forever and ever,
on that thin spit of earth
under that huge prairie sky.

That nervous but excited feeling to be picking up an old book and hoping it's as good now as before.