At lunch today I went for a burrito
and scored a table on the patio
and made my order and waited
for the hottest salsa in town.
A tremendous Spring day,
the skyscape wide with potentiality.
There was a couple on an early date,
feeling each other out with nervous smiles.
And two friends planning a camping
trip as the waiter brought more pints
and me with a rumbly belly, eyes open.
There were several loose pieces of paper
strewn on the ground where some of us
fed the boldest birds bits of chips.
It was poetry.
I mean literally.
Pages of carefully crafted, printed poetry.
Lost leaves of some manuscript,
there about our ankles.
I scooped up pages three and four,
pages ten and eleven, page seventeen too.
Deadly stuff.
I mean horrible.
Stabs at something and the usual net:
an awkward outing of loneliness,
some shrewd commentary on the trees,
lots of talk about grassy fields,
and apparently there was a broken heart.
There was one brilliant page among the
half poems. The bravest, clearest moment
he managed to compile before all the
numbered sheets, reading only:
"For Pamela"
It felt like quite a thing to hold, and I wonder
if he'd ever held her, or if she'd ever held this.
If these pieces came loose in a windstorm
as he rushed to bind them back at the apartment,
or if she had turned them loose from her front porch
after he left the last time, he loved her, he loved her not.
She finally let these petals fly as she wept,
Pamela's stringy red hair still wet from their
last long walk in the rainy woods.
Pam, sweet, homely Pamela --
I've found him, I'm holding his heart in my hands.
Samuel isn't dead, he never left for Arizona.
He misses you, though he could never say that.
Sam loves you, though you could never hear that.
His bottle washed up on my shoreline at lunch today.
He made this for you.
3 comments:
I really like this. Especially that last paragraph about finding him and the bottle washing up....sentimental old me.
See, this is why I love poets and artists -- they actually see those papers on the ground and think something of them. Most people would walk away and say only that the place needed to be cleaned up.
Sweet! Really glad you dug the piece. I'm still up in the air on whether or not I like this one on the whole yet, but there are some parts I like -- especially the turn and the last paragraph.
Yeah, there is something about the artist character that will sniff out something interesting, even in the minutia and the mundane that crowds our afternoons. I originally opened the poem:
"Even poets see the strangest things / if they will keep their eyes open."
In the end, I thought that was a crappy beginning to the poem, and just poorly written all the way around, but I like something of the heart of it, I think...
I like this, too. The twists and turns are nice and the story stays with me after I stop reading. And then there's the story of the poet, too, wondering how the salsa was. Good stuff.
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