points west
Some days,
I miss the hinterlands
some days
when the inland rains
don’t let up
and the gators
have snapped at the
last golfer on the course
in West Palm Beach
and the biggest python snake
in the world has been captured
in Kendall —
swimming in the pool
of a famous – but now
disgraced athlete
and the most informed
newscaster in the nation
has rushed to
Miami Beach
to report on the latest
scandal involving
some pseudo-politician
…it is then
…(and only then)
that I long for the plain pine bench
in the birch grove
on the shore of
some Lake Woe-be-gone
six miles southwest of Hibbing
…the one we used to sit on
when we were both nineteen years old
and we would both look west
far past Fargo, and Bismark,
…not stopping there…
on past Missoula and Couer d’ Alene
raising a toast to the setting sun
believing that it held the answer
to a tough question
that neither of us dared to ask
both of us thinking that if we
could just
watch it drop below
the horizon
on Venice Beach –
– just one single time
that our lives would change
forever.
Ed's end of the planet books 
Wow, I love this. It makes me homesick for those daydream times in my early twenties when, with friends, we would sit and talk and solve all the world’s ills and say, with so much certainty, the things we were going to do with our lives. As the Rush song says, we are immortal for such a short time. What a great poem.
Thank you for stopping by Lisa. And for your kind words.