--- D A V I D   F L O Y D

It's a sad and beautiful world, she said,
	and because she was beautiful
		I wanted to believe her.

Some woman, somewhere, is already packing her things
	before she knows she's leaving,
		and sometimes I've had a better time

doing nothing in particular more than having
	something in particular to do.  I love how drink
		puts you into your life as much as it removes you,

and how part of the heart opens for one
	as it closes for another.  I told her
		I would meet her as far as the Susquehanna

because I wanted to be suggestive of Pound's Li Po.
	Two people with no regrets--fire underneath
		the town of Centralia for forty years--
		
something both prosaic and strange.
	Better to have said, Recite, like prayer, 
		the prose of desire.  Better to have said,

Yes, it's a sad and beautiful world,
	paired butterflies already yellow with August,
		and believed it.