Utah state law mandates that sexual education instruction in schools "...shall stress: (A) the importance of abstinence from all sexual activity before marriage and fidelity after marriage as methods for preventing certain communicable diseases; and (B) personal skills that encourage individual choice of abstinence and fidelity." If you advocate privatizing marriage, here is where you might start to cringe a little but, oh, there's more.

It also prohibits instruction in

(I) the intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation, or erotic behavior;
(II) the advocacy of homosexuality;
(III) the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices; or
(IV) the advocacy of sexual activity outside of marriage

Utah law also prohibits answering "spontaneous questions raised by students" that are inconsistent with these provisions. It seems to me that any kind of instruction in contraception and condom use could be construed as advocacy for one simple reason: it works.

Consider this scenario. A student raises the question, "Isn't a condom generally regarded as an effective means of preventing HIV?" and his teacher responds in the affirmative, stating that, according to the CDC, condoms are considered 98-100% effective, even in high risk populations, to prevent the transmission of HIV if used consistently and correctly (almost verbatim from the CDC). Is that teacher advocating a contraceptive device and therefore in violation of the law? Could simply being truthful about the efficacy of condoms in the prevention of pregnancy and disease be construed as advocacy? The facts are pretty powerful. The logical deduction from this statistic is that condoms work and they work well, so well that I think that even presentation of the efficacy statistics of condoms could be construed as advocacy.

Also, what is a teacher in Utah to do if a student expresses that he thinks he is homosexual and seeks advice? By law, the teacher cannot encourage the student's feelings or even say that in general homosexuality is ok.

Utah is the only state with such a stringent law regulating sex-ed. I'm curious to know how it actually operates in practice. If there are any Utahan educators or students out there who could help me, I would be much obliged.

UPDATE:
A reader thinks my interpretation of the statute is too narrow:

In your post you speak as though facts can "advocate" but this certainly isn't the normal definition of the word, and definitely not a statutory definition. Your interpretation is even harder to sustain in light of the word "use." So they can't tell students to use condoms, but they can definitely tell students that condoms reduce the transmission of HIV by X percent.

This reader went to middle and high school in Utah (graduated 1991) and notes that abstinence was the focus of sex-ed then, too but contraception was also taught (however not encouraged). I checked the birthday of this law and discovered that it was passed by the House in March 2000 and amended in 2002.

Will’s not the only one who gets to go hear cool people talk on campus. Today, the Federalist Society at Chicago Law hosted Judge Alex Kozinski, of the Ninth Circuit, and Mr. Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, for “Executing Justice: American & the Death Penalty.” [Like him, I will caution that quotes come from my own notes and will be quickly corrected at an email from the speaker.]

Both are quick to admit that they would like to see the number of cases presented for the death penalty dramatically reduced and the scope of murders for which murder is an eligible option substantially narrowed. Mr. Bright would like to see the death penalty abolished by legislative means and thinks it will be within the next several decades; Judge Kozinski would like to reserve it for the most heinous murders.

The Judge opened the debate (dialogue?) by listing the four reasons for which he supports the death penalty.
- It is an expression of society’s moral outrage and judgment on the offender’s conduct
- It tends to provide comfort to the families of the victims, many or most of whom say they want an execution because they still fear the murderer, because his death provides closure, or because it is an insult to the dead to have the murderer live.
- There is a 0% recidivism rate among those who have received the death penalty; they do not kill guards, fellow prisoners, or escape to kill again.
- Although admittedly skeptical about studies, Kozinski noted three studies recent studies have shown that the death penalty does have a deterrent effect. [I believe two of them were by the U. Houston and Harvard.] He also compared the deterrence provided by having different punishments for shoplifting and burglary to the deterrence provided by having the death penalty for murder, an argument I did not find very convincing.

Mr. Bright then replied with a response that Judge Kozinski called “argu[ing] all the points I have conceded.” He began with an appeal to the Federalist Society members: Do we want to trust the government with human life? If you want to see an institution of government that doesn’t work very well, go down to the state courts.” I found his first point against Judge Kozinski a bit of a non sequitor: he argued that if the death penalty was needed to express moral outrage, then there are a lot of countries in the world that don’t have moral outrage against murder, and even 22 or 31 states in the US that don’t (22 = states without death penalty; 31 = states that haven’t recently enforced the death penalty on their books). He then asked if the death penalty really were a comfort to families: surely we can provide for them better by preventing the 20,000 plus homicides a year, and that if only 154 death sentences were ordered last year, then not many families are being comforted.

His arguments significantly improved when he started talking about the actual practice of imposing the death penalty. He argued primarily from a ‘parade of horribles’ perspective, while Judge Kozinski took a theoretical ‘why do we have the death penalty’ approach. As such, they often did not seem to be speaking at each other.

Mr. Bright’s first example as a death penalty case that came before the 5th Circuit: does a defense attorney who sleeps during a 16 hour long trial deprive the client of the right to a fair trial and to counsel? [More on that case, Johnson v. Burdine, is available in this law review article about sleeping attorney cases.] But not only was the lawyer, Cannon, asleep, when he was awake he called his client, Burdine, a ‘queer’ and a ‘fairy,’ and he failed to object to the prosecutor’s closing argument that putting a gay man in prison for life wasn’t very bad for him.

It wasn’t quite an equal protection argument, at least, it wasn’t developed like one, but Mr. Bright also argued that the death penalty wasn’t applied consistently across the country. I’m not sure where he wanted to take this argument other than to generate a source of moral outrage at the states who execute a lot. [I yet to meet the people who complain that Vermont and Minnesota aren’t executing their citizens, but I suppose they exist and I wouldn’t like them.] Illinois has a public defenders office; in most of the Southern states, the county simply appoints a local lawyer. Nor, as he pointed out earlier, did the pattern of local prosecution for death seem have a deterrent effect on murders; were it to, Houston would be the US’s safest city. He seemed to think that not many who are contemplating killing sit down to think “hmm, I’m a white guy in Harris County, I should really wait until we get to Galveston to kill this fellow” [Although truth be told, it would be fairly rational… are there studies on whether people who commit murders for hire actually go through this sort of calculus? Next project if the boss asks for suggestions?]

He also brought up the execution of the mentally ill as a particularly appalling punishment. [He didn’t point out this detail when he mentioned the Green River killer in Washington state, but according to this Washington Post feature, Ridgeway “told [a] psychologist about wetting the bed until his early teens, and that he had vivid memories of his mother washing his genitals afterward." According to some literature on the subject, such inappropriate contact is one nearest ways to guaranteeing you’ll raise a messed up kid as you can get.] Judge Kozinski gave the example of a killer who raped little boys, killed them, and then wrote their parents letters saying that the last think the child did was cry for his mother and father, but taunted, “you weren’t there for him.” For Judge Kozinski, “to rub salt in the wound of someone who has suffered like that. . . [is]. . . below human.” Mr. Bright seemed no less appalled at the murderer’s conduct, but took the writing of such a letter as proof that the killer must have been mentally ill: who else could be so cruel?

Only Judge Kozinski took the question of the morality of the death penalty head-on. If the death penalty is abolished, he argued, it will be for the sake of our consciences when we do not want the death of someone innocent of his crime weighing upon us. Go into a prison, he said; it’s horrible in there, men treated like animals, referring to what his friend on death row told him about life there [K: “I have a friend on death row.” B: “I know you do, but I have a lot more.”]. While some of this may be sarcastic, he wants society to acknowledge what it’s doing with the death penalty: “www.execution.org -- plug in, you can see it happen, I’m for it. I think if we’re going to do this [executions], we should be willing to watch this, we should be required to watch this.”

Overall, though, Judge Kozinski and Mr. Bright disagreed primarily on how bad the current death penalty system really is, whether and how far it can be improved, and what the best allocation of resources in reforming the entire criminal justice system is. Judge Kozinski was of the opinion that we don’t ask for perfection from our airplanes or our nuclear reactors; we can’t provide and shouldn’t ask for absolute precision in death cases, either (again, although we should reduce the number of them). Nor did he seem particularly swayed by Mr. Bright’s description of life down in the 5th Circuit, since he personally has written more decisions overturning than upholding death sentences [Fine, so I’d feel better if Judge Kozinski had to hear all death cases. But that’s not and will not be the state of our courts. No one’s going to oppose him when he says, “now I favor doing a much better job across the board, but will it happen?”] Despite belaboring the state of death jurisprudence across the nation and noting that “if you are innocent, the best thing that can happen to you is that you get a capital trial” for there aren’t Northwestern journalism classes out exonerating people with life sentences, Judge Kozinski seemed to oppose even a national moratorium on the death penalty on the grounds that those people get the best trials. That may be true at the moment, but I trust Mr. Bright when he says that the SCHR will turn straightaway to focusing on other problems in the criminal justice system once they no longer have to worry about the death penalty.

This was a lunchtime speaker discussion on the death penalty – nothing was resolved, and nothing was expected to be, so pardon if this description seems to leave it hanging. It ended with a Q&A in which Judge Kozinski ducked the hypothetical which asked him to assume the 8th Amendment’s cruel & unusual punishment didn’t exist: does he agree that the logical extension of his argument for the death penalty (deterrence, comfort to victims, moral outrage) would also support torture as a punishment for murder?

This week we bring you musings, ideas, and answers from the inimitable Stuart Buck, of The Buck Stops Here.

1: Why did you decide to start blogging?

I initially started in the fall of 2001. I was reading Andrew Sullivan's site regularly, and had seen Glenn Reynolds' site a couple of times. I like to write, and thought it might be fun to write more regularly. That's about it. (Back then, Glenn Reynolds' blog looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20011102201157/http://www.instapundit.blogspot.com/, and I was the eighth person that he added chronologically to his blogroll.)

2: Before your current blog, you had another blog, but you were forced to shut it down by your employers. Could you tell us a little bit more about what happened there?

Without revealing too many details, I was clerking for a federal judge at the time. I had told him about my blog, and he did not disapprove. But then some unknown person complained to another judge on the same court that I was engaging in "partisan political conduct." It was an erroneous charge. The ethics rules applicable to judicial clerks do ban "partisan political conduct," but examples of forbidden conduct are 1) running for office; 2) being involved with a political campaign; 3) hosting a political fundraiser, and the like, none of which were remotely applicable to my blog. Moreover, the ethics rules say that judges and clerks are positively encouraged to write about public topics, as long as they do not comment on pending cases. Nonetheless, the other judge raised a big fuss, and in the interests of judicial comity I was asked to forgo blogging for the rest of that year.

3: Who is Matt Evans, and where did he come from?

Matt is a friend of mine who was a year behind me at Harvard Law School. I've (unsuccessfully) tried to get a couple of other classmates to join up, as I often don't have time to blog as regularly as people with less demanding jobs.

4: You made a pretty interesting shift from studying the guitar to deciding to go to law school. What made you decide to go to law school, and why did you pick Harvard?

For a long time, I had planned on being a performing classical guitarist. I had some very modest success in that field, such as making it to the national finals in the 1994 solo competition sponsored by the American String Teachers Association or performing at Christopher Parkening's masterclass. He even gave me a quote in 1996: "Stuart Buck is a very talented young guitarist with a beautiful sound."

But I eventually realized that while I was a pretty good classical guitarist, it didn't appear likely that I would be able to make much of a living at it. I had always been interested in law, and often read legal books written for a popular audience -- everything from Robert Bork to Laurence Tribe. So with a little prodding from my wife, I took the LSAT and applied to law schools.

Why did I pick Harvard? I applied to five schools: Yale, Harvard, Michigan, Virginia, and Duke. I got in everywhere except Yale. So I went to Harvard.

5: Some suggested that Law School now functions as a sort of "brain drain." Bright young people, the argument goes, no longer enter graduate schools in economics, political science, or philosophy but turn instead to Law School where the monetary returns are far greater. This in turn contributes to a dearth of serious philosophers and economists, and a glut of lawyers running around suing each other. Do you think there is any truth to this?

One of the most famous people to make that argument is Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University. And one of the best responses came from Paul Krugman: "It is easy to make the case that too many smart people are engaged in looking for tax loopholes and that the erosion in the quality of our senior civil service is frightening. I am less comfortable with the argument that we would be better off with dumber captains of industry and smarter professors, and I wish Mr. Bok had laid out a better explanation of why he believes we would."

Now, I do think there is some truth to it, but only in a limited sense: If the law offers more job opportunities and higher pay than does philosophy, and it does, then more people who face the choice between the two subjects will choose the law.

But it doesn't follow that there will therefore be a "dearth" of "serious philosophers." The opposite may be more likely. To the extent that choosing philosophy has higher opportunity costs -- i.e., giving up a prosperous legal career -- the sorts of students who choose graduate training in philosophy will more likely be just the very students who are most passionate about philosophy and who have the most to offer in that field. Put conversely, the students who are willing to give up philosophy in order to have a career planning trusts and estates or drafting corporate documents are likely to be the students who would have made mediocre philosophers anyway.

In short, I doubt there are any budding Aristotles or Aquinases or even Richard Rortys (or should it be Rorties?) who leave the world of philosophy in order to spend their lives defending class action lawsuits.

6: What field of law do you practice, and why did you pick it?

I'm in litigation, and in that field have done a variety of things. I've done a lot of telecom work for SBC, which I rather enjoy. I've drafted a Fifth Circuit brief and a cert petition in a tax case. I've helped represent a few accountants from Halliburton in the ongoing SEC investigation.

I enjoy litigation because I like strategizing as to the best arguments that will persuade the court and demolish the opposition.

7: Which Justice of the Supreme Court do you most admire, and why?

Let me dodge the question a bit by mentioning several Justices from past and present:

John Marshall, for his work in laying the foundations of constitutional jurisprudence.

Antonin Scalia and Robert Jackson, for their ability to write with flair and panache.

Clarence Thomas, for his continued courage in the face of often-misguided criticism.

Stephen Breyer, for his unparalleled understanding of how governmental regulation works.

Hugo Black, for his uncompromising position on free speech.

George Sutherland, for his commitment to rationality and equality before the law.

8: You've complained about the "Bowdlerization" of the Hardy Boys; how are the Hardy Boys available in stores now different from the editions you approve of?

I can't say specifically. I just remember that several years ago, I was looking through some Hardy Boys books in a store, and while some of the titles were familiar, they looked like they had been substantially rewritten with the presumable goal of being more "appealing" to a more modern audience.

9. If you were elected president next term by write-in ballot, (and had a compliant Senate as well) and found yourself with a Supreme Court vacancy to fill, who would you be most likely to nominate?

Michael McConnell. For those who aren't familiar with him, he is one of the nation's most respected constitutional scholars, particularly in the area of religion and the First Amendment. He clerked for Justice William Brennan, worked at the Solicitor General's office, and taught at Chicago for several years, before moving to teach at the University of Utah (primarily because he and his family wanted to live in Utah). He also taught a First Amendment class at Harvard Law School in 1999, which is where I first got to know him. He is a thinker of remarkable depth and integrity, and even if Bush hadn't already put him on the 10th Circuit, I wouldn't hesitate to nominate him directly to the Supreme Court.

10: What exactly is media concentration, and should we be worried about it?

Media concentration is the growing phenomenon of large media companies that own more and more media outlets -- AOL/Time Warner, Disney/ABC, Clear Channel, Gannett, etc., etc. Should we worry about it? I have no idea. The whole debate has a lot of people huffing and puffing, but there's very little empirical evidence (as far as I know) that tells us whether there will be any detrimental effects from putting the national cap for network television ownership at a potential viewership of 45% of the population as opposed to 35%.

11: Given that judicial nominees these days get pilloried all the time for unpopular views, what should a judicial candidate do if he has an opinion he know is impolitic (believing, for example, that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided, or that Richard Epstein is right about takings law)? A lot of people don't believe Clarence Thomas was telling the truth when he said he didn't have a final opinion on Roe v. Wade, but surely he wouldn't have been confirmed if he'd said, "I know what I would do, but it's a secret."

It's a difficult question. On one hand, both the Senate and the public have a right to know a judicial nominee's general philosophy and approach to deciding cases. And one should always tell the truth. On the other hand, one gets the feeling that many Senators ask questions that are designed purely to forcibly extract some soundbite that they can use for political grandstanding. Anyone who genuinely believes in the law and its workings must find it dismaying that legal doctrines and judicial decisions are so often misrepresented by politicians.

12: If you could make truthfully answering one question mandatory for all future nominees to the Federal Bench, what would it be?

"For purposes of this question, you are an originalist. How would you have decided Dred Scott?"

13: You've criticized Jonathan Rauch's writings on "apatheism." What do you think is the proper role of religion in government and public life?

Finally, an easy question.

I'm not going to make anyone happy with this, but I often think that people on all sides become far too agitated over trivial affronts to their sensibilities.

Take the Ten Commandments case. On one hand, we Christians shouldn't act as if we are being persecuted or oppressed just because a federal court says that a monument has to be moved from public property to private property. Compared to Christians in the rest of the world -- say, Sudan or Saudi Arabia -- we have it incredibly easy here in America. That said, putting a solitary monument in a public building simply doesn't "establish" a religion in any sense, any more than stamping a Xerox logo at the end of a public document "establishes a corporation." The people who filed the lawsuit should find better things to do with their time.

Having criticized both sides, I should add that I'm more concerned about the distortion of constitutional law involved in holding it improper to commemorate the Ten Commandments in any public fashion. By such logic, it could just as easily be forbidden to post a copy of the Declaration of Independence in some public place, or to read it in the public schools. The Declaration, after all, states what was commonly believed at the time of the Founding: That there are "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," and that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

I need not elaborate on the wrongheadedness of interpreting the Constitution in a way that, if applied consistently, would make it unconstitutional to give the slightest public acknowledgment to the very principles that motivated our country's Founding.

14: Howard Bashman has suggested that courts ought to permit lawyers to play a theme song as they step up to the podium in oral argument? What would the Stuart Buck theme song be?

Something modest and unassuming. Say, John Williams, "Theme from Star Wars." Or Queen, "We Are the Champions of the World."

15: Other than that, what sort of music do you listen to most frequently?

This is exceedingly embarrassing, but I probably listen to the local rock stations most frequently. That's just because I most often listen to music while I'm driving to and from work, and it's just easy to switch on the rock stations for a few minutes. So I end up listening to bands like Linkin Park, Nickelback, Evanescence, POD, Switchfoot, etc, etc.

But I like all sorts of music. Obviously I love classical music, or I wouldn't have spent several years studying it. Some favorite composers: Palestrina, Bach, Brahms, Sibelius, Copland, Stravinsky. I also like big band, pop, bluegrass, and country. The three best CDs I've purchased in the past year: John McLaughlin playing his own Mediterranean Concerto for guitar; a CD of some Josquin motets; and Sixpence None The Richer's Divine Discontent.

16: If you had your way, who would be singing the theme song for The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King?

There shouldn't be a "theme song" at all. Look at the classic films of the 1930s and 1940s, where you had brilliant composers like Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann, and Miklos Rozsa writing symphonic scores. They didn't use theme songs. Theme songs are fine for B-movies (James Bond, etc.), but not for any remotely serious film.

But if there has to be a theme song, I didn't particularly mind the use of Enya during the credits of The Fellowship of the Ring.

17: You thought the Two Towers movie was magnificent. What do you think of the deviations Peter Jackson made from the Tolkien's texts, in particular, his choices to bring the elves into Helm's Deep, to have the Ents tricked by the hobbits rather than choose to enter the battle voluntarily, and to make Faromir into a morally dubious character rather than the honorable philosopher-king that Tolkien wrote him to be?

I don't believe in allowing the Lord of the Rings to evolve to fit our times. I'm a originalist/textualist.

18: Of course ranking schools is a bit of a silly and perilous process. That said, based on the lawyers and professors and students that you've known, how would you rate the top five law schools?

Unless you are a glutton for punishment, you only go to law school once. So while I'm very familiar with Harvard, I have little feel for other schools. And even with Harvard, given that it has 70+ tenured professors, someone else could go to law school there and never once take a class with any of the professors that I had. So their experience might be quite different from mine.

In any event, I'd probably put down Harvard, Chicago, and Yale, in that order. After that, I have no idea, except that Stanford seems a bit overrated. (In a posting from April, I compared four visiting professors I had in law school: two who had taught at Chicago and two who had taught at Stanford. The results were interesting.)

19: In July of 2002 (about the time I first started reading blogs) you wrote:

I recall chatting with Eugene Volokh at his annual Halloween party, and he was inquiring about this new phenomenon that he had just heard about -- blogging. Now, of course, he has one of the best blogs out there. And other worthwhile blogs have come and gone in the meantime. I wonder what blogs I'll be reading a year or two from now.

What are examples of legislation in which Congress has attempted to dictate the level of scrutiny that the courts should use in judging whether a person's fundamental rights have been violated? I can think of one, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

RLUIPA follows City of Boerne v. Flores (holding the Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional); RFRA followed Employment Div., Dept. of Human Res. v. Smith. In enacting RFRA, Congress had relied, to no avail, on the 14th Amendment, Clause 5; the Supreme Court replied with a Marbury separation of powers. In Round II-RLUIPA, Congress relied on the Spending and Commerce Clauses, ala South Dakota v. Dole (no federal highway funds to states if they don't use 21 as the minimum drinking age; also, why Louisiana has bad highways). There is currently a circuit split on whether RLUIPA is constitutional: the 7th, in Charles v. Verhagen, and the 9th, in Mayweathers v. Newland, said yes; the 6th just announced its "no" in Cutter v. Wilkinson.

[Gratuitous Ponser quote] I think part of the Congress's justification for they wanted RLUIPA is the same as the one that Judge Poser, in his opinion for Sasnett v. Sullivan, attributes to them for the RFRA:

Religions that have fewer members, especially if those members are drawn from the margins of society, do not have sufficient influence over the legislative process to avoid being flailed by the dinosaur's tail of legislation of general applicability, legislation not motivated by any animus toward minor sects but merely insensitive to their interests--possibly even oblivious to their existence.

In RLUIPA, Congress demanded strict scrutiny when religious exercise was burdened by general laws:

(1) General rule.-- No government shall impose or implement a land use regulation in a manner that imposes a substantial burden on the religious exercise of a person, including a religious assembly or institution, unless the government demonstrates that imposition of the burden on that person, assembly, or institution--
(A) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(B) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

My first reaction to reading this part of the statute was shock at the audacity of it all, and I wondered if there were a system by which the Supreme Court could award Congress style points for persistence and creative justifications as it invalidated their legislation. But I don't know -- perhaps such attempts by Congress are more common than I think, and this is a somewhat accepted practice.

In the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress prohibited the use of literacy tests for voters after the Court held that they weren't unconstitutional; this law, when challenged, was constitutional. In another religious exercise act, the Voting Apparel Amendment, Congress required that the military allow soldiers to wear neat and conservative religious apparel; the Court had ruled against Capt. Simcha Goldman's claim that he should be allowed to wear a yarmulke while on duty. Neither of these, however, are examples of Congress telling the courts what test they should use.

Recent discussions on this blog about pornography have reminded me of my favorite passage on obscenity, from Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot.

This quote follows an imagined exchange between a judge and a lawyer who defends Madame Bovary against charges that it is an obscene book. After arguing, among other points, that the novel supports the institution of marriage because the lady's eventual sad end is proof she should have stayed faithful to her husband, the exasperated lawyer cries out:

Is this book sexy? M'Lud, we bloody well hope so. Does it encourage adultery and attack marriage? Spot on, M'Lud, that's exactly what my client is trying to do. Is this book blasphemous? For Christ's sake, M'Lud, the matter's as clear as the loincloth on the crucifixion. Put it this way, M'Lud: my client thinks that most of the values of the society in which he lives stink, and he hopes with this book to promote fornication, masturbation, adultery, the stoning of priests, and since we've temporarily got your attention, M'Lud, the suspension of corrupt judges by their earlobes. The defence rests its case.

For the next week I'll be flying about and posting intermittently if at all. I'm thus leaving you in the hands of my co-bloggers, as well as returning guest Beth Plocharczyk. If you get really bored, chase through our archives. (This may mean that it takes me longer to respond to emails than normal. Rest assured that this is industry and not neglect).

Oh, and a poem for the road:

Song, by Adrienne Rich

You're wondering if I'm lonely;
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn's first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that know it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning