Sing with me one more round.
I wasn’t paying attention the first time;
I had other things on my mind.
I forget for long highways of time
along which I travel
sometimes blind,
sometimes attuned to distraction,
sometimes sliced to the bone by
fragments of memory
that make me damn the moments
like so many stinging ants,
invariably to be ambushed by dusk
or a smile from an old one.
Often it is something simple
like a sense of place
that touches my shoulder
and causes me to stumble
upon my voice,
as from a mountain,
amazed.