Grown old and determined before his last teenage day,
the pilot of my youth abandoned his own,
and grabbed the helm by hook and by crook,
to chart a course through the Mississippi of the mind,
Marking channels open to the Irish Catholic in the Piedmont,
to the Russian Jew on the Mesabi Range, and to anybody else
alert to the residue of the American century,
to its petit awakening, in sober celebration
Of Reichs and Empires bludgeoned and vaporized,
overthrow of the medieval curriculum, in favor of
a cool renaissance – the restatement of Elizabethan poetics,
and rearrangement of Enlightenment ethics, all
Projected against a backdrop of adolescents who
study standard ballroom dancing, which, to him,
is easy as gathering up the humid nightblue fruit
that falls from the heaventree of stars.
Dave Read