1.
They Meet

Only later did She mention that Her father
was a scientist or that Her mother wrapped
gifts without adhesives. They were still
shyly introducing themselves when she said

I used to like to jump
out of trees
when I was little.

And He was utterly transfixed by an astonishment:
that Her utter elegance shared shoes with a
living sense of play, and her voice -- earthy as
any emerald -- was woven around a laugh.

A falling feeling followed
a brief flash when I
actually thought I was
flying. Then the thump
of my body stopping on
the ground, above the earth.

These first of Her secrets He saw in mid-air.
Any chance He wouldn't love Her flew by
toward a miraculous rendezvous.
First dust, then dust. We imagine wings in between.

I always thanked God that
nothing was broken, and
something was always gained.

He realized thatt He might never know
whether it was the fearless little girl
or the lovely woman, trying to teach Him
to thank God. Why? Because nothing, still is broken.

2.
Lewis and Clark Dead,
The Woman Not Yet Born

The day my grandfather was buried,
I slipped away and climbed a Chinaberry
tree to cry out of sight and the porch voices.

From an upper branch, my hand seized
the thick rubber rope, the snake that
gobbles trees. It was dangerous and smooth,

although it trembled. It was warmishly cold.
I knew it was a risky reach, proved: I fell
to Earth, wondering if I'd been electrocuted.

A rare sight was my father raised to speed --
flinging his cup of funeral punch. Leaping
off the porch over the ligustrum and the ferns
and down to the ground and across the lawn,

All this done in a sharkskin suit in 1963.

I tell myself today: I've got this straight.
My father ran like a boy when I fell. After
I survived, quickly enough, he packed
the car and we left, forever it turns out,
before the punchbowl ice had a chance to melt.

Years before I saw the river again .
Years to remember how the snake had felt.
Years of loving the grand black-eyed man.
Years of wondering whether a pack of Camels
lives to this dim day in those old porch bushes,
snuggled up against the spilled whiskey in the weeds,
and if a sharkskin suit swims somewhere in an attic.

Years of remembering the sad question I asked:
Sir? Sir? Sir? How long will I be in trouble?

3.
No Redwoods, Not Even Turpentine Pines

Many years apart and compass points away,
they fell at precisely the same speed,
like Gallileo's pounds of lead and fluff.
But was it the same ground they landed upon?

This they resolved to explore,
this land to map and taste and chart.
This is what they thought was the great
awakening, the New World. They erred.

What a sweet and absurd notion.
Instead, everything was destroyed.
A fool, She loved to fall. And a fool, as fools will,
He expected to fly, yet knowing his leap

would make a small crater of no consequence
in the muck of the sinking city. Lead of course
landed first, and watched the feathers float away.

She offered homemade calendars which He
repaid by believing them be Her's, and true.

When I climb out of this ground,
I'll have quite a decision to make:
Her calendars or a Savage over-and-under?
I'd like the calendars garage shop nudies

and the shot to be steel, if either I choose.
Probably just shoot the calendar, walk away.

Mainly I recollect the humming
wire and the unintended fall. And
I miss most of all the one buried that
day. That day so long ago. Old man:

I miss you still.