City of Lights
Paris is the city of lights
they say.
Enlighten me
about the tents
along canals and boulevards
where no lamps show
in April evening cold.
This great metropolis
receives the wounded
of the world’s disputes
as well as its own sad displaced
by accident, addiction, poverty:
today’s apocalyptic vital signs,
and no light lifts their spirits
nor heals the darkness
scabbed across their lives.
Weeds
There are gardens beautiful
across this ancient land,
tended for centuries
in precise configurations
in deliberate design.
But turn and look
out there across
uncultivated fields,
a blaze of poppies blows,
and others, blue on gold,
and crimson dappling white —
all weeds by definition
growing wild, untended, unintentional,
too tough to fail year after year.
And in the fields we wander,
or set foot deliberate upon,
I’ll be the weeds of your delight,
bleed colour into dullest days,
too tough to fail in all
our year-by-year away,
determined to surprise
propriety within
the gardens of your heart.
Monaco Madness
A friend of a friend
of a friend of mine
got rich
and you might too
as soon as you can
toss coin a hundred heads
sequentially, or sell
those selfies off to
Vanity Fair or Cosmo,
all posed so un-selfconsciously
as petulant or glamour doll
or wistful, other-worldly,
transcendental neo-nymph.
Or, what the hell,
re-spin the one-armed bandit
buy another lotto sheet —
some friend of someone
could be next
and you
could maybe be
that friend.
Gorge Verdon
Some things should scare us,
natural events of magnitude
so far beyond control,
so vast in size or time
our elemental puniness
goes shuffling off, embarrassed
in the alcoves of our pride.
This Gorge Verdon will do it
where a hundred million years
of primal dirt
was river-scratched
a million more
to rip a massive tear across
the gaping land,
a greenery-bleeding scar
pronouncing our mortality,
to dare us leap and fly;
then trickles off, disdainful,
far below.
Le Terroir
The French know many things
concerning wine
and they will say it is
unfailingly the soil
“le terroir”
in which the vines are grown
that will determine
all things important
to the final product in the glass
that you or I will raise
to those we love.
So is it in all things
that grow the worthwhile
vintage of our lives —
the soil that nurtures
friendships, tended
over time and distance
with the hands of care.
Let every “santé” then, affirm
that you have been the ground
in which our lives
have blossomed
for the harvests of our world.