Boy's Poem

        In the magazine they printed it 

your bio’s new but the photograph’s older. 

       You can’t be seventeen there 

(smiling, clear-skinned, with full, dark hair)

       You probably edited your high-school paper.

You were reading Steinbeck first time round. 

       I think of you now, and whether its been 

ten or twenty years, I can’t help asking:

       What have two degrees, from NYU and Brown,

done to your face, as lovely, as it was young.