You Are For Poetry

They say you are attracted to someone for 4 years
then you slip into something a bit different; you learn to live together and love each other.
Or you don't.
That might be so.
I don't tell you in quite the right way,
how you are a potter, and I am a poet—
there may be a chance that we'll just go on being attracted
to pots and words, lines and clay bowls
the turning wheels of stone and the turning pages of verse.
I am for your hands
and you,
you are for poetry.

I Try To Be Playful

I try to be playful
even as the weeks go by.
I realize what everyone has been saying,
that life gets harder.
It does.
Our particular creases get deeper,
our particular wearing points get more worn.
Our ideas get old.
Now, when a friend is gone
or someone moves away
it is much more important.
This is valuable information,
to know how to carry the things we need
as life happens.
In the romanticizing and justifying and imagining,
to have some tools that do the real work
that sometimes needs to be done.

The Mind To Find A Way

Lately I've had classical music playing during the day,
hoping to add whatever effect daytime classical music might have on my life.
It comes from the other room, through speakers I've hauled across America.
My stereo is a heap of equipment I have collected over the years.
Tinkering here and there, gathering disc changers,
digging an unused receiver from a friend's basement,
that was a real find.
I haven't paid a dime for the whole get-up.
To be separate from the world-turning force,
even in a set of speakers and some wiring,
even with just an antenna and some dials,
to have a screwdriver and two hands and the mind
to find a way.