Recognition byDiana O’Hehir

The exact taste, tangy, somewhere between loquat and

pear, why don’t We ever know it when we meet it? No one says: Here’s happiness’ weather. Three years from now or seven years we’ll Look at a photograph, the people small, communal as

gnats, the house reduced In sunshine, no ghost yet Over anyone’s shoulder, no stranger riding with a

message from my mother, Knocking all the ice plant off the slope In his climb to our living room. And we’ll say: Happiness Wasn’t round or square. It never named itself, was a series of negatives: You were inconstant, not sleepless, I was not Remembering things. From “Home Free,” a forthcoming collection from Atheneum ($18.95, cloth; $12.95, paper; 96 pp.) which won the Poetry Society of America’s Di Castagnola Award as a work in progress. O’Hehir is an English teacher at Mills College in Oakland. 1988 by Diana O’Hehir, reprinted by permission.