It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

When Mama died, I lost my air. Hit with an anvil of grief. 
In dreams, the rains came. Streets filled with sorrow. 
I’m standing with Thomas at the bridge edge seeking relief. 

The sound of her voice is fleeting. Time is a thief— 
she will never return to me. Thomas says not to follow 
his lead. Don’t hold onto it. It’s heavy. This anvil of grief. 

Without funerary activities, they say, you live in constant disbelief 
your loved one is gone. You seek the Light, if only for a moment, to borrow 
so you don’t follow Thomas to the bridge edge, seeking relief. 

I focus what little energy I have on the children. My chief 
concern. When I’m clear-eyed, I know I’m one of God’s sparrows— 
yes. Mama’s dead. But He will lift the weight of my anvil of grief. 

A flood of sadness fills my days. Is this the end? It is my belief 
Mama’s spirit is heaven-bound, her earthly body is hollow— 
there’s no use running graveside, dragging Thomas, seeking relief. 

Now I know the ways of Thomas’s moods, flitting like a leaf 
in the fall breeze. Grounded. Far away. Grounded. With Thomas, tomorrow’s 
tasks: Kiss our children. Tell them we love them. Lift off our chests the anvil of grief— 
it’s no use if we both run to the Bay bridge’s edge, seeking relief.

This youth too long has heard the break
Of waters in a land of change.
He goes to see what suns can make
From soil more indurate and strange.

He cuts what holds his days together
And shuts him in, as lock on lock:
The arrowed vane announcing weather,
The tripping racket of a clock;

Seeking, I think, a light that waits
Still as a lamp upon a shelf,—
A land with hills like rocky gates
Where no sea leaps upon itself.

But he will find that nothing dares
To be enduring, save where, south
Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares
On beauty with a rusted mouth,—

Where something dreadful and another
Look quietly upon each other.