for Harlon, the brimful poet of Oregon*

I am

a wanna be city boy,
pretend-poet, weighty troubled this day,
by misdirected words
sent my way by a  country troubadour

he, a poem penned,
a reflecting pool, a two way mirror,
deserving of reversing,
of homagin' the sender
much better than the recipient

now
I ken better distance 'tween artist and art,
I, a workingman's daily dallying in craft
complex with the brutish tools of a forgettable vocab,
my works deservedly lost,
in the water-falling of the
endless also-rans

non-nebulous distances
between skies of
Oregon country blue

and
the worldly worn asphalt grayed words
of a graying man aging,
in plainest English,  let clarity speak,

one of us at birth,
god gifted,
not I,
one of us, for his tongue, like Moses-stung
with a hot coal of language's divinity

blessings, the keenest of nature,
where they divide, how they intersect,
his brimful heart in our eyes
fulfills the passerby's thirst  for revelations,
small shards of shared sensibilities

my voids filled by words of his quill

"to see his forest ‘s poetic beauty
for to see beyond the pendant beauty
within its magnificent grandeur
of his own gifted heart’s nurtured trees"

This was written April 15, 2017
for Harlon Rivers
for Nat Lipstadt