OCCUPANT
The sad mailbox of my extreme youth, what did it ever deliver? The only...

A CRITIC
Pick up your socks. Clean the house once in a while. Go to the dentist. ...

HISTORIAN
Piles and piles of books, boxes of documents, photographs, bones, shreds of clothes...

YOU WHO KNOW
I was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean straw of the mow...

GRIFFY LAKE
I spread my smooth water like a lap and caught the trees' faces where they fell...

Dear Eric,

Dusty Clinton Township kids making paper roosters and snowballs, 
showing each other the moves of chess . . . I had a two-year jump 
on you in everything. Much later, after I was filled with the Spirit 
and began to testify, we had less to teach each other. I was 
swallowed up in marvels and taken on the edge of glory.
	
I think of us that time we went out in your father's car . . . 
raising high trails of dust; we battered the back roads, arguing 
miracles of the Holy Ghost. You would not learn from my quick belief.
	
O, Eric, I had a high, pure falling when the Spirit left me and 
I felt mortally fooled. What to do now that two years running 
after God was dust and ashes? Waiting for a revelation, I 
studied rope--smiling, remembering (years and years ago) 
our hands racing towards some slender knot . . . sheepshank, 
halfhitches, hangman's noose. I thought how a taut line points 
towards God.
					
Danny