(Poem #3)Everything We Do Everything we do is for our first loves whom we have lost irrevocably who have married insurance salesmen and moved to Topeka and never think of us at all. We fly planes & design buildings and write poems that all say Sally I love you I'll never love anyone else Why didn't you know I was going to be a poet? The walks to school, the kisses in the snow gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age: our legs are young again, our voices strong and happy, we're not afraid. We don't know enough to be afraid. And now we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope that some day she may fly in our plane enter our building read our poem And that night, deep in her dream, Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka, with the salesman lying beside her, will cry out our unfamiliar name. |
Everything We Do -- Peter Meinke
Album -- Ron Padgett
(Poem #2)Album The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt. |
Toast -- Leonard Nathan
(Poem #1)Toast There was a woman in Ithaca who cried softly all night in the next room and helpless I fell in love with her under the blanket of snow that settled on all the roofs of the town, filling up every dark depression. Next morning in the motel coffee shop I studied all the made-up faces of women. Was it the middle-aged blonde who kidded the waitress or the young brunette lifting her cup like a toast? Love, whoever you are, your courage was my companion for many cold towns after the betrayal of Ithaca, and when I order coffee in a strange place, still I say, lifting, this is for you. |