Four Poems

For the 6th of April
for Marie Ponsot

Eden is
pots and tubs on the terrace.
Tenacious seeds root, wind-strewn,
to bloom around the ficus.

Light and shade
from this and every decade
cross and dapple the notebook
you hold open in your lap.

Eighty? Well,
forty, too, and twenty: still
no one's fool, a canny heart,
spirit joyously at school.

Precocious
child, you run ahead of us
aging enfants terribles of
a later generation
...