All Tom's Children.

All Tom's Children

   Facile yet frantic time
   heralds a year's passage of grief-stricken
   sameness among us as
   remembrance foams at our mouths.

   We retreat to our alonenesses to think
   him back, his patient, thoughtful
   responses given in half-sentences
   many of us simply finished.

   His retort, "Yeah, that's right," when you
   said something that resembled his thought
   became an audience response to his musings
   in a final poem about the New Orleans he loved.

   We see the Mississippi--its length,
   depth, strong currents, muddiness and
   contradictions--as his river.

   Coffee shops all conjure
   him with notebook and Mont Blanc,
   pensive but willing to have a chance conversation--politics,
   Monk or Miles--but never money.

   "Don't worry about the money,"
   was his litany;
   "Do the work you enjoy."
   Most of us didn't listen.

   In our youth he took us from
   Gulfside to Galveston. Gull
   and water-watchers, we grew
   wiser for the trips.

   We were midnight
   callers with folly-filled,
   articulated dreams and wanderings
   that bordered on ridiculous.

   He listened intently,
   labeled little as foolish,
   the only note of judgment
   his polite change of topic.