Love Work

My love, travel to me quickly for time

strikes like a ruler slapped on a pupil's hand.

Put work aside, worry, too, all the Midwest

Presbyterian principles I once loved you for

and still do. I have learned there's more

to our being here, so tenuous and brief,

than securing sums for retirement. After that, we'll be

past caring about all we own save each other,

hand to hand, and what we may have stored

from the grind, grit, from gratifying sweet

instances, compounded through desire and will.

Tick tick goes the time clock. I hear it

in the recent statements of our industry,

collected fast in a binder like a rebuke.