By D.S. WALDMAN
Kentucky, United States
64-West
After Calvino
When you ride a long time in the private
night of your pickup cab
you enter eventually
into a desire you cannot name a greater dark
that wants only what
in this commonwealth
of rain and power lines it can never attain how
the screen door
you left through in West Jessamine
swung then hesitated hung for a moment
as if holding out
for something before easing
shut with old wire complaints You drive past
the “Florence Y’all” water tower
which you cannot
see with the black sky steep around you which if
you could see
would mean you’re nearing Cincinnati
a city worth stopping for worth running to
KY State Fair
About time, never wish for more, you told me,
and never wish for less, as if the present were
one of those teacups one sits in as a child, rotating
at once around two different centers.
I lived, in those days,
waiting in line––metaphorically, so it can often
seem now, though the line was real, as my life
in it was. I spent much of my time listening
to the intonations
of words: conversations drifting,
and being drifted from, variously, until,
by nightfall, it was just the carnival. Each child’s
name…sprays of laughter…all folded into
the wide
reeling of bells and tiny cymbals
that, perhaps by design, struck just faster
than the flicker of seconds. And I remember now,
in darkness, looking across
the river at the lights,
an idea a young boy posed, once, to his father:
that, if we send a mirror far into the stars, we might
see, in our reflection, one of our past selves,
cowlicked, probably,
and disheveled. And how,
if we keep going, pushing ourselves farther
from ourselves, we’d see, eventually, the blankness
we were one day born into. I forget what you
told me after—I think it had something to do
with loneliness.
D.S. Waldman teaches creative writing in San Diego, California. His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel and Colorado Review. www.dswaldman.com
Image by Flickr user Paula Soler-Moya.
