Sunday, September 30, 2012

Asking a Woman Out, Cold: A Prose Poem and a Memory of My Childhood


I am going to be bold, walking like this, a slight list to the right on my injured leg, to your door and knocking, having seen you several times from there, leashing your dogs into a trot; walking these fifty yards, past barking pugs and an elderly stare that measures the lilt of my eagerness, to say when you finally answer, looking at something near your right nostril, as deep and dark as that is, something almost witty about a beer and a shot or maybe you’d rather just sip a coffee and watch a lifetime of cream drip into it, drip like the drizzle off the shadow of the leaves I stepped under on the lake shore, watching a moment as you tugged and twisted your bathing suit, swimming, God knows where, maybe toward the fantasy of the far shore, diving just then, a flash of yellow ties, to gather pebbles you would polish and trade for the feathers your mother would use, use to make the headdress you wore on that Thanksgiving we wrote in large, tentative letters on the paper of flimsy turkeys, in the quacking uncertainty of first thoughts; I watched from only a gesture away while slow tears welled at the corners of your eyes, as you gathered the pine needles you had dropped in the hall on the first day of kindergarten or maybe it was the last. 


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