My Life

I have lived many wonderful lives.

I was a little boy in England
and I ate Christmas pudding with real money in it.
My sister got a firework stuck in her dress
on Guy Fawkes Day.
My parents were crying in the old townhouse
on the day Kennedy died and I was four.

I was a Boy Scout in Spain,
and I made a rubberband gun
to catch dragonflies
and fed them to chameleons,
right out of my hand.
I ate sherry grapes off the vine up the hill,
and they were golden balls of honey.

I traveled to see the Grateful Dead in college.
I walked in a boy and walked out
tattooed from head to toe in prayers.
I can still read them.

I worked hard and had two children.
They were irrepressably happy,
good as Macintosh apples in Vermont in October.
I backed away from my marriage
until I had one step left behind me
at the edge of a high cliff.

I stopped searching
for anything outside myself.
I sifted the wind alone,
blistering and blinding.
At last I found you,
round-eyed, amber, and moist.
With you I write new stories.

All of my life is extraordinary, and yet
I wish I could convey the feeling
of being a minor character
as yet unaware
of the center of the wheel
upon which he is a spoke.