MEN LOVE TO PONDER

                                                  risk, as in,

“How can a poet truly risk anything

anymore?”

Once, there was a pasture, a goat; once,

everyone was a farmer. Fresh ghee. Then war.

It happens like that.

Water buffalo milk, a fresh country.

Always another line, new map.

                                                              Risk? Like that.

Someone once wrote in chalk behind my office desk:

Where have we been all this time?

I come from my mother, and her mother, and her mother.

That’s all you need to know.