Three new poems not from Wild Once and Captured

I put so much effort in trying to get the poems for Wild Once and Captured ready, I didn't write very much, at all. No poetry, not much else. But here are three that I managed to scratch out and aren't in the book. One, the last one, "Ourselves," came to me on a long walk when I didn't have pencil or paper. It was entirely written in my head long before it got to paper. Maybe that's why it's so short and so predominantly one-syllable words.

Unexpected Joy

We never talk about bliss.

She thinks I can’t remember.

He thinks I’ve never been.

You guess it never happens.

I know it takes big space

here and there and inside my head

and comes easier in daylight

than in darkness.

But unexpected joy in

simple and in silence

and clarity that I know

so little after all

and suddenly okay with that

makes me want to share her bed

and hug him to me

and send to you this way

what little it is

I do know.

Line of Descent 

None of the men

who came before I did,

not my father or his brothers,

nor their father or Dave, his brother,

or their father or his

back to Isaac

and to Ishmael

or more precisely

to some bastard on Dublin streets

sat in his car at sixty-five

staring at the field

across the road

listening to Who sing Baba lyrics

thought that the last quarter

of my life looms ahead

and I don’t know

what I will do

with it.

Ourselves

We have it

within

to be

where we are

so why

so often

so lost