WHEN YOUR DAY OPENS

When our day half- opens
in unshaven grief
playing a sonata by Chopin
at daybreak weighing in
being between green innocence
and a summer remembrance
of feeling without purpose
helpless at surface wounds
in past aches of adolescence
we awake to our belief in life
ordering blueberry pancakes
with neighbors in a local diner
near the Golden Calf
or just to embrace in laughter
a surrendered memory
of that melody in B minor
which moves our riffs
still rambling in the spirit
such music which outlasts us
as a visiting Dutch poet
silently buries
his words on a sandbank shelf
along the riverbed mermaids
who hear country songbirds
on slate roofs of the Cape
waves arise beyond myths
from his draped words
over nereid nymphs of the sea.