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Everything We Do -- Peter Meinke

(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. 
-- 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.
-- Ron Padgett

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.
-- Leonard Nathan