Sixty years and I’ve never been here
on top of this hill.
Well, welcome.
Thank you. It’s beautiful.
It really is.

[To meet a modern flâneur is to be graced by the day and the path and chance, if you believe in that.]

I’ve been to the lake many times, but I’ve never made the journey up. Why bother?
San Francisco has some beautiful places, he says, and I’ve been to many of them—even out to the airport—because I like to walk.
But I’ve never been up here before.
And it’s wonderful.

[In appreciation, he pats his khaki knees, thumbs the straps of his well-used pack, and grins.]

I’ll let you get back to your day now.
Goodbye!

A season is coming
A reason for going

The dancer is changing her skirt.

A newly paved pathway
A journey yet halfway

If a tree loses leaves, does it hurt?

and you wonder
if who you have been
is who You are meant to become.
Beating your breast
cursing the now
for not telling you sooner
where your edges are.

It’s okay, my darling.
We lovers
we humans
we minor, minor gods
are always standing
on a coast
that fog knows better.

you know the trail,
but have you seen it at seven?
with the spanish moss?
the sprinklers on?
feet finding the familiar
path back toward
the sun you'll spin
another day around.

alliteration isn't only good for writing, babe.
consonance can set a friendly pace.

so mind the Ps & Qs, my love,
and while you're at it, the As and Us
that rest on a tongue pressed
to the back of the teeth.
the rhyme to the beats
the cushion you always wish
--halfway to home--
these shoes were to your knees.

There’s reveille
and there’s reverie
and there’s the all-too-wakeful revelation
that your dreaming heart
has been beaten in time
to the rhythm of a Keats sonnet
every year since you first read it,
sixteen and leftfisted
at a righthanded desk
in the center of a
—you only now realize—
ironically yellow-bricked classroom.

You’re older than he ever grew.
Trapped on a shore
of the biggest island
no one told you until recently
you could leave.
So you seek water.
And a horizon that blurs
when you look for too long.
Fishbowled lenses never broken
yet perpetually breaking the surface.