Robert, your startlement reflected mine

When we met last month here in Oklahoma

After four or five years of e-mail only.

My teaching gig, your reading date: sheer chance,

Which governs half of what turns out to happen,

Can feel in retrospect like Destiny—

An antique concept unavoidable

If we maintain that Character outranks

Other engines spinning the threads of life.

 

But Cherokees… no, several nations marched here

A century ago might be allowed

To doubt it. Also, European Jews

Transported to Auschwitz. Or inhabitants

Of Gaza City, Tel Aviv, or Baghdad

In our day. Character is Destiny?

Not when shrapnel rips through civilian flesh.

Violence never stops for poetry,

Whose worst assignment’s to console us for it.

 

You’ll laugh, but Oklahoma’s the New Jersey

Of the Southwest, not just because they both

Have oil-refineries. Compare the horses,

The Neo-Gothic universities;

The hard-wired habit of preferring truth

To prettier versions of reality;

And a penchant for collusion where elective

Government is concerned. No beach towns, though,

No Long Branch, like the one your books describe.

 

I recognize your childhood, which didn’t look

Auspicious. Not even you, back then, foresaw

That one day you’d be tapped as laureate,

Quoted by admirers in fifty states.

Now, flip back to the Seventies and see us

Introduced as having written that year’s

“Best first books”—you, Maura, Tess, and I,

Invited by the Y to read and prove it.

Right then I knew you were a sure-fire bet.

 

And the bookie, it turns out, was right! The rest?

That’s in the lap (you know the phrase) of the gods,

Whose offhand ways with me you’ve more than once

Countered. All right, I won’t recap the facts.

We might have been mere rivals. Are long-term

Friends—a freebie I got from Destiny.

Warm sunlight here in Tulsa. Autumn leaves

Vacillating… When they do fall, gusts

Will bowl a Figured Wheel along Route 66.