Five Poems

After hours, off-duty, the young chef talks:
He perches, in his denim earnestness,
On a bar-stool, folds himself like an omelette,
And worries about his troubles with aubergines.

There are times to be not a fly on the wall,
Nor in the soup, but a kind ironic god:
Invisible, I watch the two of you press on
Through the whole ratatouille of emotion.

The Reasonable Shore
And there are days, beyond dog-days of summer,
When the restless ocean gathers in repose,
Soughing and lapping at unprinted sand,
Proving that greatest power is power contained.

Shakespeare's shore of reason was the mind
Which, he believed, the tide would cleanse and fill
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