This Is Not A Love Poem
Missed Connections in the City of San Francisco
This is Not a Love Poem
This is not a love poem, but more like an old receipt
you might stare at absentmindedly
before it crumples back inside your pocket: a recounting
of a little thing; a glimpse,
not a revelation; not the secret
of a young face in an old locket;
not a shroud of blackbirds, diving at loose ends.
You see, when I write “the mighty waves had swept us
on and on,” I don’t mean love
had gripped us in its dogged jaws (though it did)
like Scylla (or was it Charybdis?– the other was a giant squid).
See? I’m no good with metaphors (or similes).
No, I’m talking about that day at the beach,
soon after we moved back east,
when we drank cheap tequila and danced to Le Tigre
on the bone-white sand, smoked a joint
and succumbed to joy in the blue-green ocean.
I thought I heard you shout “Synaesthesia! like Nabokov!”
above the water, as we bobbed further out
and the sun fell under. I swam over, held you close
as if I understood, and joked we just might wash up
in Portugal by autumn, and you laughed that pixie laugh
I so adored. I had no words. I don’t know why
I remember these little things, but I still do.
Her Two Cents
We forget so many of the little things that those we do remember seem to take on a larger than life meaning. The snapshot in our mind of a particular place; a sentence or phrase embued with a deeper meaning beyond the words; scraps of paper that float about for days, weeks, or years reminding us of something as simple as a trip to the grocery store. Can these moments still be a love poem? I think so.
