My mother bore me by the virtue of never taking anything too seriously-- save for the ridiculous -- and in this it was her talent to behave most comically in anger and sadness and to relieve us of the fear of such moods taking shape as the big truth. (The big truth being that lumbering giant who goades and pushes at our sides and shoves our jeans up to the calf to say the ankles hairy and everyone knows it)

As it hangs

As long as you are alive, I think--- There
is the Possibility. And happiness waits for no man
but me. Like the arc of a slow dive that goes on
curving for years toward the surface of this
& reaching the water, finds it is a fish, afterall---
This is my life