Boomerang
An elegy for a friend from down under.
For Dan Ross in the Deep South I was having a pot of Guinness, as they say here in Melbourne, in the middle of the day, when I thought I saw you large as life, in your winning, rumpled, animated way. I remembered you with a pint of black, standing in Savannah on the banks of the river. You were celebrating your fiftieth birthday. I can still feel the heat, but it makes me shiver … It wasn’t you, of course, just your doppelgänger – ‘Now find a rhyme for that!’ I hear you crack, and from deep down under I give you boomeranger, thinking you are down under too and won’t be coming back.