Take a picture of your bright and funny friend
In love,
His eyes lit up like a night bridge
Glittering red and white.

A picture finds you,
surprised and inchoate,
you'd been
alphabetizing tapestries
of the neighborhood so long;
you in a room, piled up with moldy threads,
Gold and blue lace unraveling.

Crystallize a place through the people
Some have tried; a little book-store
Searching for honest eyes,
But looking so carefully for the threads
that the picture is lost.

How a poet becomes a community organizer
is an accident.
All those lines of words,
if only they could be as clear as a photograph
As clear as the diamond deer
as in one burst it leaves the meadow.