No

these few hours kneel down
as I pick up the evening paper neatly hurled onto
the porch– front page
story of her accident, rammed
her sporty world into a cement truck

for 10 years I have not seen her, & here she is
typed & misspelled in the Ellwood City Ledger

the first girl I ever wrote poems to
is unconscious, barely alive!

on the news I hear the mingling of death
& business, the wilds of a human life, bitterness
tunneling out of this electronic cave!
(the man speaks like dust, his voice
is the disappearance of silence)

from the past, stained with the desire for the future, she
rises, muffled & angry, enduring the painful moonlight

simply, this is her last poem

I have burned the rest