Edit 7: Reflections in St. Augustine

[RiverNotch]

technical notes:

Romanticism, Abandoned 
 
Time bends, deceiving promises  
made when we were headlong and young,  
as elusive light pools to lost and thin men. "as" should be "like", or else "pools" reads like a verb.
What major will teach me how to siphon  
water from light? 
 
Within its rippling reflections, I recall 
your face, glowing alongside another's; semicolon should be a colon, since the next phrase follows directly from the last.
you had found someone else. I wander 
in the timeless shadow of the Notre-Dame, cast 
by nameless ghosts, a wayfarer far from home. might be a bit pedantic, but your speaker did just name that ghost.
 
Now I am almost as old as my parents 
when they surrendered moonlit flings 
to the garret's cobwebs and dust, to wipe comma unneeded, although i can see its purpose. better to reword the entire thing, perhaps to something like

Now I am almost as old as when my parents
surrendered their moonlit flings to the garret
in order to wipe our tears, dress our scrapes.
our tears and dress our scrapes. 
 
It's time the painter has learned  remove "has".
practicality when there's no grey  
of truth daubed on his palette. 

critical notes:

Romanticism, Abandoned 
 
Time bends, deceiving promises  
made when we were headlong and young,  "headlong" feels synonymous to "young" at this point, and thus redundant, especially since both words exist in the context of broken oaths.
as elusive light pools to lost and thin men. this line reads less like the interesting kind of heady, and more like the meaningless kind of heady.
What major will teach me how to siphon  also, to question the pursuit of a major -- the only "major" that, for me, means something here is a college major -- right after railing about how the speaker was once young guts the poem of meaning for me. i am right now a college kid, and, like my vision of this piece's speaker, i do keep referring to the simpler joys of five years ago, i do keep trying to leave romanticism behind, i do keep reciting to myself Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech; but at the end of the day, especially when i'm trying to compose a poem bigger than myself, all of those struggles quickly fall apart: things might not be as simple as before, but ultimately i still jam with Khalid's "American Teen" or Lorde's "Melodrama" as a peer, not as an observer.
water from light? but to provide a simple, unpoetical answer to the question: no major will. i think even english or creative writing majors would tell you that: majors are meant to give you the tools you need to write for much quicker than for us internet-bred autodidacts (my major is far from anything creative), but the impetus for greatness still lies with the creator.

Within its rippling reflections, I recall concerning the metaphor that ties light and water together, as far as i can tell you use water very little all throughout. the reference to rivers is effectively dropped by the poem's conclusion, with the next stanza's "tears" having its connections to care, rather than its identity as a liquid, emphasized. the metaphor, overall, is a little weak, and even if the speaker meant to make it look like his or her old age was dry, since time is clearly what is referred to as water, and time can't help but be universal to both the romantic's and the realist's point of view, the subtlety fails.
your face, glowing alongside another's; 
you had found someone else. I wander and then the introduction of a "you", particularly a "you" lost to "someone else". possibly good as insight on the cause of the speaker's angst, but with the last stanza's question it reads more like you were trying to hit the high-school-poet's jackpot.
in the timeless shadow of the Notre-Dame, cast 
by nameless ghosts, a wayfarer far from home. it is a little unfortunate that the very real image of the speaker walking around in the streets of Paris isn't further developed. i suppose it's kinda well-worn, but it's still a level higher than abstraction.
 
Now I am almost as old as my parents 
when they surrendered moonlit flings 
to the garret's cobwebs and dust, to wipe 
our tears and dress our scrapes. i was going to comment on how i should perhaps retool my readings around this, as this perhaps makes the speaker to be older than i first thought him or her to be, but then i realized two things: first, that by most accounts this should be at around the age of my sister, which by my reckoning is still too young (as far as i know, it's thirty years old and above when one really starts to age); and second, that at any rate "almost" is so nebulous a term that it could mean sixteen or seventeen, which could root this even further into the triteness i've talked about throughout. in short -- well, see below.
 
It's time the painter has learned  
practicality when there's no grey 
of truth daubed on his palette. again, the angst here feels particularly cliche, especially when given a lot more thought. i'm not exactly in a good way right now, but even i can note that truth isn't all "grey" at all: modern or enlightened railings against romanticism not seeing the "truth" of things miss the point entirely -- or rather, truth is only "grey" when one is totally colorblind. i'm all for the painter learning practicality, sure, but romance is far from sustainability's antithesis, and the greats rarely had to sacrifice creativity for the sake of, say, raising kids. (time and health, perhaps, but they wouldn't have been great without "moonlit flings")