Would you start being twenty-eight in you thighs, your toes, your head?
    Would twenty-eight begin in your belly-button?

Theresa used to come over every day. I’d be standing by the kitchen window and hear her cowboy boots on the walk. Then she would stand outside the door—I knew—listening for a sound inside, scratching the door with a twig, or reaching up to the handle to pull on it, softly, so no one would hear. 

I fought all the knights, until the electricity gave out.
And that is my glory.

And so farewell to you, who will not slumber,
for all was in our words, a world of sand.

Give me your body I shall never know to the end,
Give me the vessel, not the wine.

The pressures of my life bring together my birth day
And my death day, like history books.

People caught in a homeland-trap:
to speak now in this weary language

All the crumbling things
Are on their way to becoming one again

And their faces are still crisscrossed
with God’s will.

Sandals are the youth of a shoe
And the memory of its trek to the desert.