Now that I am old

I have a new relationship with weeping.

I weep for commercials

and white butterflies.

For ugly children and their children,

lonesome roads gray

as heaven. The tax system.

My ghost in flames under the ash tree.

I weep for the joy of weeping.

For the marathon runner, long-distance

trucker, poet, farmer—

all who are professionally acquainted

with endlessness.

When I was young, I wept

for pain. Now

I weep for beauty

and his bastard son darkness

and his wife my life.