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These are a few of my . . .

I had intended to write about them
but got sidetracked.
Garrison Keillor reading a Simic poem
filled with images of people walking -
limping, weaving, shuffling,
classic ballroom dancing
(reminding me of my first
Simic book - Unending Blues -
from Boulevard Books
now an apartment building
just upstreet from my office).
Then Julie Sheehan at poems.com
threatening to come back
in clapboard,
dormers sprouting like underarm hair
a big crazy Victorian
with lead-based paint on radiators,
old fashioned,
and a little bit insane
but sturdy to a fault.
Driving to work
I pass a house
I wish I lived in
(Why are they dredging the pond?)
and turn green
before returning to Annie Dillard's
erudite telling of the Maytrees
Lou and Toby
their bohemian life together
in Provincetown
and Toby's dying
in view of the water
in the audiobook's killer last chapter.
I did get out there this year
with my girlfriend
and four kids
strolling along Commercial Street
with its colors and costumes and characters
rejuvenated.
In The Maytrees
Lou a painter tells Toby a poet
about the incredible light
in Provincetown.
I am so blinded by all the lights
in Provincetown
that I've failed to notice
what many call
the light in Provincetown:
the streets drizzled with sand,
the sounds, the smells,
the shops, the galleries,
the Pilgrim Monument
Race Point
Herring Cove
the dunes,
the bicycles,
hundreds, with their front wheels
propped up like puppies' paws
onto wooden fences
along the beach.
And the ocean.
Always the ocean.
Or the sea.
Which is it?
I prefer the melodrama
of the sea
as in Melville's
great shroud
of the sea.
Early one morning
years ago
jogging
I passed Norman Mailer
with newspaper.
Another time
Mary Oliver.
Then Stanley Kunitz
working his tiered garden
on the west end.
I could see their words
floating above them.
Into work
with its blur
of meetings,
then off to the gym
during lunch
to use the speed bag
in the boxing room
taking me back
forty years
to a summer with troubled teens
in a School for Boys
that eventually gave us
Mike Tyson.
I was an assistant counselor
in one of the cottages
which housed
a pool table, speed bag, heavy bag.
We all had a go at them
under the tutelage
of the rec director
a former Golden Glove middleweight.
One afternoon, a fracas erupted
over a pool game.
He and I jumped in
and in the melee
my right elbow loosened
a teen's front tooth.
That afternoon
I drove him to a dentist
who wasted no time
pulling the tooth.
I said nothing
but figured the dentist saw this kid
as just another delinquent
who was being dealt his due.
Later, on the drive back
we stopped at my mother's.
She fed us, fussed over us.
The next day
he handed me a thank you note
to give to her.