Falling into Conversation with Lewis

           —for Lewis Warsh on his 60th birthday.

The flower-child headband photo
and Jackson Brown’s Late for the Sky
At Bolinas
and in the Berkshires
Lewis
   grew hair
      kept journals
        bared the souls of his teenage girlfriends
                      married Bernadette
                weathered The Sonnets flap
      told me to visit Jim Brodey if I was ever in L.A.
    reared offspring
  briefed the whole
And here
     the scenes in so short a compass
                level the street
            lean high up
          far, icy
   I go and we talk
         to contain particles
            invisible in their shadows
                fame for a moment
                  desolate into tandem
            travels the vivid thin arch
    in any glance, meaning
             cut sometimes
          not answered
         glows
          through torn paper
                 the milestone between 59 and 61
               winds down
            things
     hum for awhile
    lay on the morning
          while some of our history
                    never leaves