You must be dead at least ten years.
You must have lived an unremarkable life
before that: a teacher, say, of unremarkable

For the sake of argument pretend
we don't know who they are, this couple,
one on either side of a cast-iron tree

"Once More Valuable Than Gold"
—Guidebook to the Wieliczka Royal Salt Mine

         Were we in Grand Rapids,
   at the Amway
Plaza, say, the seventh or eighth person       

By the fifth day of rain
a few had begun to dance,
though not quite properly,

Not the kiss alone
      but an essence of kiss,
its dark matter left undisclosed

Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

And still there is no season's story told
by words, expressive, eager to explain;
no winter's tale will pass from mouth to mind;

Lillian Russell, I think of her standing
at the rail of the Niew Amsterdam as it sails
through Caracas to get a taste of the real slums

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

I’m singing a song for the romeos
I wore for ten years on my front stoop in the North Side,
and for the fat belly I carried