Visit with Vlad

---

                                                                                                        First published by The Tokyo Poetry Journal

He’d kept it for thirty years: 

a photo of three toothy teens 

perched on his mantel, 

a moon in mist luring him back to a time

before war wrecked his Belgrade, 

when he was in school with us in Brooklyn, 

before Ben had a brain tumor at nineteen. 

Fireflies flitter as we sip old fashioneds 

in his garden overlooking the Danube. 

Life’s fleetingness floats on their wings 

as they forge luminescence from edges 

like we had in that photograph,

young and weightless, 

glowing in late summer sunlight.

Had we sung in studio that day? 

Or watched Shakespeare in the park?

Our cheeks had glistened as if  

sprinkled with russet dust, 

harbingers of autumn that already

                                                          seeped in at margins.