When I think of where I’ve come from
or even try to measure as any kind of
distance these places, all the various
people, and all the ways in which I re-
member them, so that even the skin I
touched or was myself fact of, inside,
could see through like a hole in the wall
or listen to, it must have been, to what
was going on in there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything—When I think
of the miles and miles of roads, or meals,
of telephone wires even, or even of water
poured out in endless streams down streaks
of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,
or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it’s spring
again, or it was—Even when I think about
all those I treated so poorly, names, places,
their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and
I never came, was never really there at all,
was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven
like a car along some empty highway passing,
passing other cars—When I try to think of
things, of what’s happened, of what a life is
and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,
the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,
all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still
waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,
presences, of children, of our own grown children,
the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,
each physical moment, passing, passing, it’s what
it always is or ever was, just then, just there.

(Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org)

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

My father lived so far from the page
      the only mail he got was marked Occupant.
            The century had cored him with its war, and he paid
                  bills in person, believed in flesh and the family plan.

In that house of bookish females, his glasses slid on
      for fishing lures and carburetor work,
            the obits, my report cards, the scores.
                  He was otherwise undiluted by the written word.

At a card table, his tales could entrance a ring of guys
      till each Timex paused against each pulse,
            and they’d stare like schoolboys even as he wiped
                  from the center the green bills anted up.

Come home. I’m lonely, he wrote in undulating script. I’d left
      to scale each distant library’s marble steps like Everest
            till I was deaf to the wordlessness
                  he was mired in, which drink made permanent.

He took his smoke unfiltered, milk unskimmed.
      He liked his steaks marbled, fatback on mustard greens,
            onions eaten like apples, split turnips dipped
                  into rock salt, hot-pepper vinegar on black beans.