Knowledge of Good and Evil

(for Gloria)

We did not steal the apples. They were three for two and I bought two for me and one for you. "'We love one another,'" I say. So when you did not want to walk with the walker, I let it go. Later you spent the night designing a machine that would make life easier. After the fall it did not matter what Franz Wright poem I read in the rec room to keep you company. If my mind was half on something else. "'We don't really know anyone well, but we love each other.'" It took six decades and in the seventh your brain hit your skull when your head hit the floor. The Harlem river outside. Winter coming on. I know the names of several people who did not do anything about it, though they heard the sound. Somewhere sometime we are all accountable for what we do. It is not our soul. We must give it back the way we found it.

As for me I regret everything -- no, nothing: the river was just right, as I remember it, when I walked out into the rest of my life, exiled from the time I could have said goodbye