Doug Anderson: Youth And All That

After Keats

My mind was everywhere but seeing.
The tree was just another me, the water
my fluid state. And others, well,
they might as well have been
wearing my face I knew so little of them.
A strange disease, what is it for,
that time of life, but stumbling?
Do we need all that strength and fire
just to wear our bruises well?
Perhaps a blow to the head,
or to the heart, a need to understand
that superseded all else. Maybe
old Mort sticking his wormy skull
into my dream. But the gift was this:
all that was outside me came in.
As if I found some “…untrodden
region of my mind” that never closed.
Open all night like border town bar,
a soul back-lit in the absent door.

Copyright 2016 Doug Anderson