ive me the desire to know but steer me clear of the debasement
of constantly offering up experiences or explanations, give me the fortitude
of my ancestors, knees bent on floorboards, lips open only when the heart is full,
give me mysticism and the blank lines of laundry I knew for so long without
the severity and shutting off of the radio, give me radio, give me dance music
and the static that comes between music in the long stretches of Tennessee.
Give me tree bent by wind; the twisty ecstasy of both expecting and enduring beauty.
And on the train the woman beside me hunched over her phone, texting, Maggie,
Maggie, surely you know by now who it is that interrupts those spaces, don’t you?