On the Other Hand, You Could Have Been Run over by a Truck a Couple years Ago

The tool best fitted to your hand lies centuries deep in an undiscovered midden.
Your onetruelove's parents will be born this year.
That man in the rumpled gray suit you passed in the Taipei airport, speaking what language you      
     couldn't even guess--he would have been your best friend.
The animal that would come to you most readily to have you stroke its soft hard flank was the
     assemblage of bones you shuffled past with your third grade class.
The medicine that would still your fine tremors is locked in the bark of the big tree in your yard.
The recipe for the malted milk cake your grandmother always made you is on a page stuck to another
     with a dab of frosting in a cookbook your mother just sold in a yard sale.
Your favorite and most secret perversion is advertised every day in the Battambang Herald.
The language in which you would write your best poems is spoken by three old women in a high
     valley of Irian Jaya.
The only surprise party of your life dispersed without a trace that night you worked late last week.
The knowledge that will change everything, on its journey of millennia, riding on the light from a
     distant star, is now only a hundred years away.
And yet I, now with memory failing,
in this house built the year I was born,
I am here for you.



That woman in the Taipei airport wearing outrageously clashing colors, she would have been your
     best friend.


And yet here,
with memory failing,
sitting in this house
built the year I was born,
I am for you.