Before the world takes you away to keep

you to itself, and others take my place 

at center-stage, I will be stuffing bags of

everything that’s you, until it happens, like

the silly knock-knock jokes, the little pranks

you telegraph beneath a covered impish grin,

At sixteen, seeing that soldier majorette so

bold and sure as she led the high school

marching band down the town’s parade route

in white hat, gloves and boots with tassels,

A flock of common house sparrows, hundreds

of them, roll up high overhead as I walk across

the parking lot clinging to my cup of joe early

I see him through a buttonhole of blue

as I cross the parking lot, up there on

a pinnacle perch on a lone dead branch