I could hear the exhilaration in your voice and feel your warm regard for all the workers and the newly-arrived immigrants of all colors and cultures – and your deep belief in us, in America.

I can’t help but wonder whether Booth’s bullet was God’s mercy for a weary and spiritually depleted Abraham with little more to give.

What will they use it for? I wonder: To serve as a filler for cracks in the intertwined sticks in their nest? As a soft liner for chicks expected soon?

Off again into the morning on a dusting of snow from yesterday

Below my walking feet, I can feel the waiting tight-knotted roots slipping loose, hear rumors of seeds and bulbs finding their first pulse, displacing, inching aside the encasing sod one granule at a time.

About to give up, and with my home in sight up the hill, I manage to imagine a willow leaf – slender, tapered, lance-like shape – dropping from this pond-side weeping tree, almost a plummet, spinning silver all the way down over the water below but missing the water, landing on a lily pad, on the lily’s burning-yellow stamens, the center of all yearning.

He showed up monthly for his Prolixin

shot, a “chemical straitjacket” to quiet the hectoring

voices in his head, and he’d already discovered

that other shots, vodka in a volume continuous,

offered an added muffling to the noises echoing

in his brain, at times even making him feel

“normal”.

I gaze up at a second-floor clotheslines on Hobart,

the rusted pulleys, the rope the only new thing

added after years so many.

I move on, shuffling a block through brick-red leaves scattered over sidewalks, then head up the hill and circle the perimeter of the Polish cemetery, catch sight of a woman 40-ish I’ve seen there before, today sitting in the grass, serene, a cup of coffee in her hand, two headstones at her feet (mother and father, I’d guess), letting her thoughts slip away to the two by her feet, who catch every soft and tender wind-drift word,

maybe……