The street Yes teaches the soul
To lose all hope and fight
With standard flesh in parallel
Reflection of drowning realities.
The street Yes teaches the heart
To break and gratefully piece itself
Back together like broken sidewalks
Uninterrupted in the geology
Of parallel violence.

The street does not teach tenderness
To rise with renewed passion;
A Phoenix phenomena pounding
The chest and crushing the solitude.
The street does not teach
How to cope with happiness
Or the success where none was before,
The street always educated,
Heavily, for its burden.

Will was drawn to that spot
spirits or not, something-body pulled him there
like a mystic magnet that attracts flesh

and flesh he found in that grove, between
a stubborn hackberry and twisted oak: mother and newborn,
their blood soaking the prairie grasses

he walked the hard mile to the pay phone
passing but one unfriendly ranch house on the way
a growling cur keeping him at bay

the operator connected him
with the sheriff who collected his one deputy
and was there in half an hour

Lord Almighty, Lord Almighty
the deputy kept saying, those chants hanging
in the hot air above the bodies  

while the sheriff checked for pulses,
his khaki pants painted round red at the knees
for he was too old to squat  

neither knew the girl, who couldn't
have been age of consent, but the baby looked pink,
strong, though still as stone

the ambulance couldn't make it there;
the driver and deputy carried them out
on one stretcher

both commenting how light
their fated cargo was, how it was a shame
they perished in that old copse

Will knew that was meant to be
when he found them: the little one first clinging
to a dark warm sea inside

forced out by time, her helpless heaving,
and some invisible hand that took part in all matters
of flesh, spirit and bone

the same hand that did not cradle them
but at least found them shade, a cool but cruel
reprieve from their terse time in the sun

Sweetwater, Texas, 1959

She said yes but it sounded like a no to me . . . Feathers make the toes giddy . . . Goodbyes make you weep . . . we bottled up sunshine in empty plastic bags . . . Friday was the first day of the beginning of the week . . . Doc said your tonsils have to go . . . they were supposed to go out with your adnoids last week . . . the storm was catastrophic . . . we cut up trees for twenty weeks . . . I had her engine running . . . purring like a kitten . . . as I stroke her fur she said that she was hot and sorely smitten . . . then she pulled me on top of her . . . "You can kiss me now", she said . . . the wind was howling just outside the shed . . . the lightning flashed across our faces . . . the thunder shook the bed . . . the Saturday Evening Post . . . the pictures I so attentively read . . . when she said she was finished with me , then I finished up with her . . . the storm had passed leaving life now in the dust . . . still her yes it lingers . . . saintlike in the vaults of memory . . . you should have said "no" to yourself and returned the book to the presence of the shelf .