13 May 2018

I wakened to find
my mind wandering
far from me,
my mind like a boat,
oarless, off course,
a mind not content
to idle in one place,
a mind stringing places
like beads to make
a necklace of experiences,
my mind, in San Francisco,
a different mind, from my mind
in Paris, different, again,
from my mind in Athens,
my thoughts like the wines,
from region to region.
A California white is neither
French nor Greek,
John Muir not Camus not Homer.
Muir mapped streams
no man before him had known
to map; Camus, streams
to ford existentialism;
Homer’s sea streaming
immortally down through the collective
conscious.  These my mind
sculls, freestyle.  I row
the rapids of ever-changing thoughts.

Philip Kuepper
(10 January 2018)