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Unwise Purchases -- George Bilgere

 
(Poem #244)Unwise Purchases
 They sit around the house
 not doing much of anything: the boxed set
 of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
 The complete Proust, unread:
 
 The French-cut silk shirts
 which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
 and make me look exactly
 like the kind of middle-aged man
 who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:
 
 The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
 the mysteries of the heavens
 but which I only used once or twice
 to try to find something heavenly
 in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
 and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
 when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:
 
 The 30-day course in Spanish
 whose text I never opened,
 whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,
 
 save for Tape One, where I never learned 
 whether the suave American 
 conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
 at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
 of obtaining a room
 actually managed to check in.
 
 I like to think
 that one thing led to another between them
 and that by Tape Six or so
 they're happily married
 and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.
 
 But I'll never know.
 Suddenly I realize
 I have constructed the perfect home
 for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
 who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,
 
 and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
 there lives a woman with, say,
 a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
 near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
 drying in their tubes
 
 on the table where the violin
 she bought on a whim
 lies entombed in the permanent darkness
 of its locked case
 next to the abandoned chess set,
 
 a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
 the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming 
 has always dreamed of meeting.
 
 And while the two of them discuss star clusters
 and Cézanne, while they fence delicately 
 in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,
 
 she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
 fixing up a little risotto,
 enjoying a modest cabernet,
 while talking over a day so ordinary
 as to seem miraculous.
-- George Bilgere