Let us celebrate tonight the strange ways shadows have
of courting the earthly objects that cast them.
They hang around their very necks like desperation
or jealousy, or wishfulness, or sad thirstiness in homeliness.
I can’t bear to criticize them, since they don’t really exist.
Yet I want to watch them all day and silently judge them,
what fools they are making of themselves.
I want to go over and say something to them, right where they live.
Look at the shadow of that sycamore tree lying there
on our hot summer street, dodging the bullets of sunlight.
I watch and think, “I’d rather be dead than be that way.”