Poem for My Twentieth Birthday

Passing the American graveyard, for my birthday the crosses stuttering, white on tropical green, the years’ quick focus of faces I do not remember . . . The palm trees stalking like deliberate giants for my birthday, and all the hot adolescent memories seen through a screen of water . . . For my birthday thrust into the adult and actual: expected to perform the action, not to ponder the reality beyond the fact, the man standing upright in the dream.