It’s not the sea rising & falling
I listen to,
It is the past, with its
Outmoded morality,
Survivors on a planet
Nearly drowned.

When in college I first read,
Ah, Wilderness!
I was Richard,
Spouting Swinburne & Fitzgerald
(Edward, not the later one) &
Hobbled by innocence,
Declaiming word for word
Wine! Wine! Wine!
“What. Without asking, hither hurried whence?”

But last night at Lincoln Center,
With my wife,
I identified with Richard’s father
“And lay men shrouded in the living leaf.”
This I presume we call progress.