JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Don across the landscape, cohorts gleaming

tilting at juxtapositions, anguished lance

steelblue with longing for new conquest

 

Toy lover, spears fish from streams

crystal dreams with anachronisms for wings

 

Thus I remember him, a hybrid Don

quick as a key he slides into my mind

slotted in, double-imaged

A celluloid copy of himself, flower child

distributing petals, too perfect ideologies

garlanded in wonder every day excited him

each step a giant one, each breast a fount

each skirt a treasure trove

 

To plunge sweet words into willing sighs

after rock concerts

in twinned sleeping bags

on moonlit beaches where rows of breakers

chanted om and om again in white

absolute certainty that the world

was a good place

 

Down decades he wandered

distributing blooms, paling utopias

and tiny packets of seeds, replicas

of himself to sow in tearful

memory of his visits

 

This autumn, scores of strides away

these seeds, planted in abandon

have blossomed in wild loam

marking the paths and patterns

of his strolls

 

A daughter in Holland, two fresh

grandchildren on her lap, a book of verse

in French dedicated to Don on the off-white

inside flap, a son in Mozambique and

two more where Cape breezed fly and gulls screech

 

And here and there across the stretches

of a new country, little Dons and Donnas

are turning up in quaint corners

 

We’ off to visit him after all this time

this aging Don, sword still sharp, words still

golden honeyed, he’s over sixty now but

like the dandelion child of forgotten

innocence that he is – still full of

sweet wind-blown surprises