Dear Mister Warren,
i am reading you again,
more thoughtful reading perhaps
buffered by the passage of time:
your time, my time,
perhaps because
we come from near the kindred borders
of Kentucky and Tennessee with
limestone pockmarked hills
of cedar, pine, oak, poplar, dogwood
and, of course,
hickory;
lives reared by the hills,
farm gardens, several dairy cows
in the pasture next to the barn,
hogs in the muddy slop of the sty,
all of which did not know time,
your time, my time
until it was gone.

The mockingbird trills another song
as the stars mock time
but not in golden California
or
the snow blotted woods of Connecticut:

did i write of stars mocking time
or
did i repeat what you said?

Does it matter with time?

i am more often now older than time,
antique words past time,
lost
far from those rolling, curving rivers
of water and time
in the hills and valleys of the Shawnee
when deer and bear roamed the woods
and
even then, the mockingbird
trilled its borrowed music
in our ear.