October, Sunday, 10:37 A.M.

In Detroit a child is dying in the hospital bed.
We do not know what he feels.
The parents sit quietly nearby where
the light streams in through the window.
We know more about them.

In the grocery store checkout counter in Albuquerque
the boy in adolescence has lost the check his mother gave him.
He sees the seven people behind him listening to his dead grandmother,
“You never pay attention, what’s the matter with you?”

In Wichita, Kansas a young woman is putting a man’s penis into her mouth.
It is the first time she has done this.
Not her heart, but someplace close to it is thrilled, she wants it never to end.

In Portland, Oregon a blind man is
waiting for the 10:37 bus with the seeing eye dog.
the bus comes up the street and the dog moves
the man toward it. There is a kind of caring in the
slowness of the movement, and then the dog sees the black
lab coming up the street and something different begins to move
up the muscles of his legs and into his chest and he turns his head and
shoulder and stops and moves one foot away from the bus and looks at
the lab, takes two more steps toward the bus, stops again and turns and looks,
then something bright goes out of his eyes and he takes the man onto the bus and the door closes.

In Gary, Indiana a man is putting his penis into a woman’s mouth.
She does not want him to.
Not his heart but someplace far away from it is thrilled,
he wants it never to end.

They are in high school biology in Des Moines, Iowa.
He is fifteen. She is sixteen.
He told himself he would not look at her today.
She is soft orange like a peach or a cat.
She is wearing the tight gray cotton dress,
the one with the hem just below the knees.
At l0:37 she walks across the room to the pencil sharpener.
She takes his eyes away from him and they follow
the dress that follows the round bottom
halfway down where the upper buttocks are outlined,
but the true wonder, where they begin to curve back in,
where his breath stops, is hidden.
Then she turns and walks back toward her desk
and her face, the place of pure pollen, weakens his
last power and draws him finally
to love's dark shining center.

In Ft Lauderdale, Florida
the woman with the shopping cart
warms herself under the morning sun
on the green park bench away from
the large crowd of eager observers
come to see the space shuttle lift off.
She does not know what day it is,
what state she is in,
what her age is,
she does not know her name.
She only knows about God.
At l0:37 her head turns toward the loud thunder.
She sees the fiery behemoth lift toward heaven.
She is glad someone is finally sending a message,
she is glad help is coming.

In Los Angeles, California
a small girl, six years old
sits astride the new blue bicycle
her left foot on the ground and her
right high on the thick black pedal.
She turns the handle bars a little to the left.
She does not know that we found an atom and
split it and made a bomb and dropped it on girls on bicycles.
She rolls the bike slightly foreword and backward a few feet
then pushes down hard with her right foot at 10:37 and goes round
and round fast in the joy of not knowing, in History’s circle of mercy.

In Seattle, Washington two middle aged lovers,
David and Marie are lying in bed together in the morning.
They met on a computer.
He is from Illinois, she is from Saigon.
Once in Pnom Penh he hid in
quiet terror in a bush waiting for the
gunned boots, ten feet away, to find him.
Marie’s brother Kai Tim fought with the Viet Cong.
Last night he left his newest child with them for the night.
Her name is Thaila. She is thirteen months old.
Now she rolls between them in endless delight,
not to the right and then the left which she does not have,
but first to one of them and then to the other.
She touches David’s beard and then Marie’s ear,
she shrieks with laughter.

In New Jersey a 56 year old bachelor
sits in the back aisle at the concert hall
for a Sunday morning symphony of Mozart’s ‘Requiem” mass.
He is wondering how he will die.
Behind him, one seat to his right, an
8 year old girl distracts him with her fidgeting.
She does not yet know Death
as the insistent visitor in the mind.
She knows it only as a distant guest
who lives somewhere else and
will never come to her parties.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says,
and then, “My arm hurts.”

In Montgomery, Alabama,
eight year old Isabelle and nine year old Michael
drink the blood of Christ at communion then
turn around, walk quietly toward the last pew
and continue on quietly past it out the door.
They hurry down the stone church steps,
turn left and run across the grass into the woods,
their chests pounding.
Isabelle stops. "Okay, this is good. "
At 10:37 they drop their pants and squat down
and then grunt hard as the brown mounds
fall out of them onto the earth.
As they stare at the astounding steam rising up
they look at each other, laugh,
then turn and run fast.

In St. Louis, Missouri,
one week after the dead girl is found in the park,
at 10:37 a forty-seven-year old Chinese man
is being lowered into the back seat of the police car,
his hands handcuffed behind him.
His face is without feeling.
"I just wanted her to be quiet," he says.
"I told her to be quiet."

A child in America,
a small boy three and one half years of age
turns his head hurriedly at 10:37 to follow the darting dragonfly.
It is bright crimson and yellow and blue.
He has never seen such a bright yellow, such a sharp blue.
He does not think about them. He does not think yet.
He only sees that yellow and blue can fly.
He does not know they are yellow and blue.
He does not know yet.
He lets them undo him.