(at Richard Eberhart's fiftieth)

The way women talk. Ills from next door.

Cures for evils. The young pregnant ones

Talk all day, terrifying old witch talk,

Old mouth-to-mouth drugstore bottle.

My wife tells me her fears in bed while

Our next baby kicks me. I'm afraid, too.

Last week, telling a poet's tall cousin

(he's a scientist, he'd asked me why)

Why his cousin is a poet to be admired-

Reaches of the spirit, a traveler

In eternals, open, and tragic, too-

I dazed the cousin of my poet with words.

I turned to the room. A vision comes anywhere.

This certainty, birth and death surely,

Blessedness near us all, offered here,

I was free to accept for those I love.

Stating the poet, the world I defined

Because of the poet, lived up to it.