FRIDAY, MARCH 6THIS IS ONE OF THOSE DAYS when I couldn't make the BLOG writing fit the photographs I took today. The poem grew out of another writing task that has something to do with a journey. I took today's photograph at La Jolla Cove and Mission Bay. For the poem I needed something about trains, so I found in my files a train depot from the month of may last year, and a train I snapped in England last year.On the Train to Uncertainty

We citizens of mystery envelope ourselves
in capsules of silence and closely guarded
private space except for the woman in red
leather tights who invites all comers in
for a price, I imagine, or perhaps for free,
but that’s unlikely considering everything
costs something one way or another.

The young woman in yellow flowered shirt,
soft, smooth, and comfortable in her space
makes herself up as she goes along: curling
eyebrows; smoothing powder; touching lips
with silver gloss like nothing in nature but
perhaps a lizard I once saw on an Arkansas
river bank... checking everything with a mirror.

The young scholar engrossed in his small book
disdains obviously everything outside himself,
daring the world to prove itself better I guess
than what he finds in himself and in his book,
and otherwise to stay the hell away unless an
occasion and reason rise spontaneously the way
only love does but not very often in real life.

All of us are intimate strangers bound together
for the wonderful scary as hell ride to uncertainty.