Let me change perhaps just the mood a bit.
This is a poem I wrote in Mexico.
I had a five-year-old boy with me.
And I suppose the natural thing that comes
is that sense of anxiety or a sense of worry.
You don't quite know where the five-year-old is running.
You don't quite know what he's getting into.
And he would disappear for hours and come back later.
And I got accustomed to it after a while
and thought it was all right.
And there was a way in which he was really
in touch with a landscape and with the people in ways
that I was not in touch.
He discovered that in his own way.
And I realized that, for example,
at night when he undressed, there
was really a kind of road map of everywhere he'd been that day.
And my process of bathing him was really
discovery of what his life had been
that day where he'd been it's called back from the fields.
Until nightfall my son ran in the fields looking for God
knows what, flowers perhaps, odd birds on the wing,
something to fill an empty spot, maybe a luminous angel
or a country girl with a secret dark.
He came back empty handed or so I thought.
No, I find them, thistles, goat heads, the barbed weeds,
all those with hooks or horns, the snuggle tooth,
the grinning ones, those wearing lantern jars, old ones
and beards, lepers and silk lagoons,
the multiple pocked moons and spiny satellites,
all those with juices and saps like the fingers of thieves,
nation after nation of grasses that dig in, that burrow,
that hug winds and grab hand holds in whatever lean place.
It's been a good day.