I wrote you forty-nine nice lines outside the parish hall, and said them over and over to myself. I scribbled them on a napkin and looked at the ink-running palimpsests, like the layers of a forty-nine line cake in my hands. I buried them in my billfold and pressed them down in my pocket neatly. They were nice lines and I said them quietly, leaning against the wall, watching the buzz of clouds and stars above the street, above the lake, above the wavy waterfalls and reeds.

I wrote you forty-nine nice lines and then sang them aloud while we stared at the ceiling and slept. I secretly wished that we were staring at stars, and fell asleep, fell asleep, fell asleep. And I dreamed that God might have seen me standing outside the parish hall. And in fact, I'm sure that he did. I know God watched me scrawling these lines, because I did not feel alone, not at all, though all of my friends were inside or already gone. Max had just left us, and the wake had just started, but out I went to wed words from my head to this world. And I felt marriage, not melancholy. Me and my obsolete old body, me, macabre middle-class man of the Middle-Mid-West - I felt alive, felt married, felt love.

I'm an old, old man and I haven't written poetry for years, years, years. Didn't need to write, didn't need to read, I suppose. And you were the book that I couldn't stop thumbing-through, couldn't put down over lunch, had to read. There was some heavy presence, some weight, some significance, in your words, and I marveled at their mystery in my open hands. I read until I could only carry you with me, in my pocket or my pick-up, to lunch or to the fields, too afraid to read anything closer to the end.

Then forty-nine nice lines came into my head like a fire, and I spoke them out, wrote them out, sang them to you.