Much as I though of the war in Kuwait

I expected it all at my front door:

flooded soldiers, bombed levees

and at any moment my house destroyed

by the Mississippi because Dick Ford said,
”It’s going to be a lousy summer.”

Uncle Bill took me to the cliffs in Alton

to watch the water escape the Kaskaskia.

When he asked me what I thought, I said,

“It looks like chocolate milk,”

and while putting his camera in his pocket

he turned his back to me and cried.