What luck — an open bookstore up ahead

as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,

and then to find the books were secondhand,

with one whole wall assigned to poetry;

and then, as if that wasn't luck enough,

to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,

the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of

my chapbook, out of print since '83 —

its cover very slightly coffee stained,

but aging, all in all, no worse than flesh,

through all those cycles of the seasons since

its publication by a London press.

Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:

the man I thought would love me till I died.