This morning, a note on my desk from friend Roger Davies, whom I remember best as a very small boy who had spoken little, but who meant as much as his fast-talking older sisters. He had written about the beautiful fast growing world which cannot be seen here in South Hollywood, though I could imagine its immense tranquility in Nova Scotia, where he had decided to live during the Vietnam War. This morning, a paper on my desk, and on the paper his poem and a note of longing for the perfectly natural world:

“Maybe those of us lucky enough to live that childhood paradise life of Pilgrim between whatever wars the US would be up to, have a longing for feeling, hence feeling alienated, for a peaceful state of contentment and acceptance by a beautiful natural world…”

In Praise of the Pretend and the Rumpled

When the sergeant
was barking, the recruit’s
mind was leaping
with the stray dog
across the field there,
as it sniffed its way
into an unknown destiny.
Where the boy’s shirt
was meant to be flat
as a sheet of steel,
it was rumpled like
the ravine he imagined
the dog’s nose mapped
in the memories of scent.
Clearly he wasn’t A1 material;
certainly he wouldn’t do.
When the allegiance
to the Breakfast of Champions
was each one’s destiny,
just like on TV,
he was seeing his family --
all leatherback turtles --
readying for the long
migration across
a white expanse of sea.