Across the backlot's crab and devilgrass

past jimson corrupting the footpath

in the burnt-out shed's half-light

I watched you wiping soot from what

the fire and rats had left behind.

And thought how the happy

survive and multiply and, getting

others, usually forget first wishes.

But what did you wish in saving

your mother's letters -- her rains

of worry and worship sent

to dorm addresses in the 60s?

Or your guitar, its long fretted neck

bubbled under the ash, your porkpie cap

formerly pert and workable?

These, and political buttons, their

fairings heat-bent and brittle as sin,

and a political banner I almost heard flap in

the air again, and gears from the press

you oiled and cursed and loved

into radical print. "Just stuff,"

you said, shrugging it off

like a bruise, like a soft spot

gone hard, reproving what was

implacable and raw in you,

what made your human privilege

literal from the start, what made

you, dreamer-you, lay away in our shed

the parts of your sometimes

high and sometimes ordinary life.