How odd, when teacher becomes pupil.
How startling, when a depth of meaning
Lay on the surface all along.
Wisdom, it’s said, is indistinguishable
From farce in the fullness of youth
Or unmitigated age, bent on redemption.
Could it be we’ve seen all of it?
No use adding footage to pore over
In search of cheap salvation.
There, written on a careless breeze
Was the whole of it,
Gone until the next moment.
That winter in Palavas
We pulled our coats about us
And stamped our way
Along the bundled beach
Brisk wind whipping
Through our young hearts
Sparkles gleaming from the prancing shore
We caught shelter
Among the sun-slanted shadows
From the slow cadence of the surf
Rush…rush…rush
Down the beach
Two hale young men
Germans by the look of them
Dressed in scantly painted
Swimming briefs
Tossed a medicine ball
Back and forth in rhythm with
Weathered waves
Determined beyond all reason
To return to work
All a-dusk and rightly trim
Later, some chance-encountered lads
Suggested an evening in Grand Motte
“We’re not rich!” I laughed
But we were
Serenity falls
Into the open morning
Stifling a yawn
Life ain’t what I thought it was
All those years ago
In the end, all the pain and joy
Alike
Fell in a grand heap
And life, stripped bare
More like a humping walrus
Than a lame gazelle
A poet once told me
He’d rather write about
Cabbages
The changing seasons always seem to beg for conciseness. And it is National Poetry day.
Seasons are not rounds
Each reflecting the other
Then why these same sighs?
Fall is upon us
Old winter waits patiently
Counting cricket calls
Bees make love
To the last blossoms
Of summer
I
They say time is a river
You can never step in twice
In the same place
But I know you can
If you wait long enough
Between steps
If you wait until it’s unrecognizable
Until you step on a dry patch of grass
Crunching underfoot just so
Until you taste the clay the color of dreams
Until you feel the sweat making canyons
In the soil on your forearm
Under the seeping sun
Unfiltered by knowing
I say you can, by being still and listening
To the strangely placid screaming
Of cicadas
Dying away into the night
II
Among the ghosts I saw
In a strange and fitful mirror
A young man, lean and early,
Sunlight stranded in his hair
Skin the color of baked earth
Heart like pierced leather
Eyes berserk with possibility
I saw myself, long ago
exiles child 