2. Under a burning Australian sky lies my Regina's grave. Burned by the sun, with hot sands and cool nights like hands caressing, keeping it safe. Sleep, and go on sleeping, under your skyblue eyes; not that I'll get to see them again, any more than they'll ever see our faraway childhood sky. Still, I do keep them like two tiny dew-beaded pearls. That time we went together, one last time across a flower-crested field, scanning the hillsides for approaching rain, then stopped in the doorway to a brokendown old house and watched a bright green, rain- washed field, shiny with beads of rain, and listened to the thunder rumbling, the rain hissing in over the hills. Your eyes a rain-washed field, two beads of rain. Maybe I really should not have taken your hand that time. Maybe not, after all. Hands join like roots, and not just to uncover lives. Sleep, under the wide span of a silk horizon, and go on listening to that strange balmy wind gusting in through forests, level sands and laketops, all that way across briny high seas and faraway islands -- still listening for that faraway echo of childhood, the one voice your friends had in common -- while I keep on going, growing more and more remote. And where, with your eyes open wide, so clear and child-like, are you now, Marcele -- left behind as you were in some small nameless town in central Germany -- and you, Vladas? The time I met you two, that spring, sunk in the teeming green at Wilhelmshohe, guiding each other along past the falls on your way down a gushing hillside in spring, watching the high water, branches on trees, you held hands all the while. And it never crossed my mind, not once, not even the time a whole bunch of us went singing through flowering midsummer fields, along the pale Wiesbaden streets -- I never once even happened to think... the gray Hessen sky, all the pale little towns, would stay so entranced, listening for the approaching laughter, those sweet friendships . . . that it was all one woven into you all beauty and love and suffering  sleep little one sleep while I keep going on to make my rounds complete

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