i wrote this in another age with a beautiful woman long gone in mind. i think about how many things i did not know and how many things i did know and how it created me then and now. As Bob Seger sang in “Against the Wind,”  “i wish i didn’t know now what i didn’t know then.”

i think about New England in 1968 and 1969, especially Newport before the world made it and a whole bunch of other places vanilla and marketing new tech of old, old. Ahh, it was a lovely world for a fresh launched Naval officer in a land so different than the  small town South from whence he came and planets and ages apart from today, not better, not worse, but oh so different. But it was also beautiful. This poem was generated by that difference and that beauty on a solitary drive from Newport to Boston.

Late in Summer

palsied pink fingers: looming autumn clouds
gently tap
the horizon awake;
an infinite gray ribbon of highway
slashes through
green phosphorescent hills.

non-think
embraces the drive;
his mind wanders
to pines and someone
far away.

cool solitude,
impervious to the immediate objective
excites brute loneliness:
thoughts of someone
gather as a gray storm
tumbles like a cascading stream
in his mind.

palsied pink fingers
curl to a fist;
enlightening rain
spits on the windshield
while far away
sweltering rays silhouette the pines