Jacksonville Beach, FL
The curving coast
all round with sand
your orange face
behind it in some
pastel world
of crabs and divorcees,
Ward the Professor
who oversees the HVAC
and the covenants
of some sea-side
condominium community.
Your dream of making history real
is now a footnote in the journal
Pan-American Highway Notes
—not the highway that you live on
where the college students learn
how to break their parents' laws.
Once I was that college student
awed by your integrity,
your drive to make ideas come to life
through humor, hard work and humility
—the book that changes it all
may be the book that's next to read.
Everything on notecards,
not a thought that could be spared,
no frivolity on the graduate student's road.
I didn't really notice
that your heart was not quite in it,
how fear of losing everything kept you going.
How the years have set you free of that
to embrace a mess that's not
so very different from my own.
Cloudpuffs from tenured pipes
as down below I veer
to not know someone who I never could.
It was only me I guess who still believed,
you never would.
