The crisis is always the same.
What if, after collecting coats and toys
TV sets, gratuitous old shoes, we should slip
broke and walking out of Sherman’s Atlanta
barely ahead of gangrenous caissons and burning?

And suppose the children were not
the same every year with surprised grandmothers
getting canned goods and hand me downs, but refugees
with swollen bellies begging the roadside
and sooty fingers plucking our penniless sleeves.

It has somehow to start elsewhere.
The world I make love to has always
had your skin. Its roots and contours
swim in your sea, telling each other touching
all the things that are told.

Yet there is always that other, sometimes
so much of it we die for a while or a lifetime
(once as a child I caught the same
tiny fish forty-seven times). In Sherman’s fires
we swim, tiny fish in buffalo grass.

Love because you must before the world wakes
to the dead city and everything gone but smoke.
Tug at each other’s coatsleeves. Do not let go—
as though there were someone to forgive the burning
as though there were someone to love us but ourselves.