Wanderings

                 For Jesse on his Birthday

I imagine you walking,
air like candy flowing into parched lungs
that think they never breathed before.
Stranger's eyes look at you from beside Coke machines.
Stranger in a land perhaps
not strange enough,
filled with jarring echoes of home.

I imagine the lands you travel through
as one who sees them on TV:
picturesque landscapes, Kodak moments
frozen in time, insects embraced in amber.
Each day is a new moment.
Something new to see - and be?

Not a week passes when I do not see something
I wish I could show to you
or something is said you'd love to discuss.
Half a world separates us yet sometimes
I feel you are closer than you seem,
like an object seen in a rear view mirror.

When our roads meet again
we will have much to say to each other,
knowledge to share, to learn, to remember.
Wisdom, perhaps, to express.
And we'll know if time has made us wiser
and if air can taste of candy.