one magnificant night,
hopeless dream,
thirsty awakening,
long gone friend appeared.
i’ve forgotten you
but I have thought of you.
once last year
i saw a travel brochure from arizona.
i heard you took pictures in arizona.
i heard you had kids and
the state paid you handsomely
for color photos of tourist deserts.
i wonder if middle age maladies
eat at your insides
like they eat at me.
we had traveled together
through the mountains of carolina
were red neck stares
and dirty white gas station attendants
refused your mexican body the restroom
and we had to piss in the woods.
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we have spent more then one night howling like wind
off of the great lake,
bobbing and bouncing as two old men in a rowboat during
a storm,
chased the same women. wrecked the same automobile.
all to often as i grow older, i feel the sticky impermanence.
not with anger or sadness, but simply with
changeless resignation and vague resolve.
i praise the children of my house (as you must yours)
i want the woman who feeds the child (as you want yours)
i warm myself in a midwestern sun (as you do so in arizona)
i recite to you explanation and definition of incidents
and happenings, scowls and mis-shapen thoughts
that i did not have the time nor wisdom, feeling nor words
to tell you then.
i measure things now in heart beats and breaths instead of
inches and miles,
experience and commandments instead of dollars and dimes.
you helped me to accept myself
with mockery and laugh at myself and measure myself
against the most valid of all units.
yes, i do wonder about you. and i do hope for you.
yet i cannot remember what you look like.
