If What We Change Does Not Change

Our Wedding Plans Please Everybody As If We Were Fertilizing The Earth And Creating Social Luck.

Pain Is A Forcing Sieve That Turns Me To Gruel.

Now That I Am In My Forties, She [my Mother] Tells Me I'm Beautiful; Now That I Am In My Forties, She Sends Me Presents And We Have The Long, Personal And Even Remarkably Honest Phone Calls I Always Wanted So Intensely I Forbade Myself To Imagine Them. How Strange. Perhaps Shaw Was Correct And If We Lived To Be Several Hundred Years Old, We Would Finally Work It All Out. I Am Deeply Grateful. With My Poems, I Finally Won Even My Mother. The Longest Wooing Of My Life.

Live As If You Liked Yourself, And It May Happen: Reach Out, Keep Reaching Out, Keep Bringing In. This Is How We Are Going To Live For A Long Time: Not Always, For Every Gardener Knows That After The Digging, After The Planting, After The Long Season Of Tending And Growth, The Harvest Comes.

Live As If You Like Yourself, And It May Happen.