I’m greedy for the pack rat to make
it across the swift creek. It’s my first swimming
pack rat, and I wonder why he wants the other side.
The scent of a pack-rat woman perhaps.
I’m greedy for those I prayed for to survive
cancer, greedy for money we don’t need,
for the freshest fish to eat every day
without moving to the ocean’s shore,
to have many lovers who don’t ruin my marriage
and that my dog will live longer than me
to avoid the usual sharp boyhood heartbreak,
to regain the inch and a half I lost with age, to see
my youngest aunt pull up her nylons again in 1948.
Oh how I wanted a real sponge, a once-living
creature, and a wide chamois cloth to wash
cars for a quarter, a huge twenty-cent burger
and a five-cent Coca-Cola for lunch, greedy
that my beloved wife will last longer than me,
that the wind will blow harder up the girl’s
summer dress, for three dozen oysters
and a bottle of 1985 Pétrus at twilight,
to smoke a cigarette again in a bar, that my
daughters live to be a hundred if they so wish,
that I march to heaven barefoot on a spring morning.