What did I find in love’s high offices,

the lives of saints, the words priests drilled in me?

I’ve found more love in parlance of the stones

as they ring one another’s melodies

mornings I’m jogging them, the river road.

Antiphonal, that’s what I’d call this luck

I’ve drawn out of the music of least things,

the lesser burden, the least kind of weight:

first I found a rat skin in the sewer grate,

then droppings of the sparrows shone, turned gold.

What do you think of my perplexities,

Constant Reader, you whom I call up

out of the stones, you who have walked with me

down streets we haven’t even found names for yet

and never will, maybe—and will we care?

You’re at the window as I tell you this,

you’re watching rain, you are the rain itself.

New Orleans rain, sun-shot, rain Midas gold.