Let me finish with three love poems.
One of them is here, is not strictly love poem,
I guess it is.
It's a poem to my children and it has an epigraph
but it's a strange epigraph.
It's two lines that were in the poem that were so nice that I
wanted to save them but the poem couldn't
stand to have them in there.
They were wise lines and not too many poems can bear wisdom well.
But I like them nevertheless so that they're in the epigraph
of the poem, the poem is called "Rewrite."
The lines are, "dying starts early, my lovelies,
and with luck you'll call it life."
"Our children cannot save us, though someday we may find
ourselves in an unfamiliar sea of sheets, calling their names.
Our children may reach down but their arms
will never be long enough.
They would surely miss us even if they dove recklessly
into their futures where we are in different orbits.
And we must not try to save them,
we must keep our wisdom to ourselves when we're sinking,
our mouths full of desperate speech,
and our children above us in their beautiful,
ignorant bodies."