Blank Verse (from '99)

At the time it was painful reading the note
you’d left with the librarian to hand me,
a piece of filler paper creased four times,
or so I’d thought, to enhance the mystery
as a necessary prelude to the message:
don’t you want to dance and sing it said

Thirty years between the sending
and reception have erased the rest,
the exact but flowery language of a crush.

In a new town, I resort to playing records
in the library, a tiny brick structure
the size of provincial train depot
contending with rows of palatial houses
white and hooped by wrought-iron, a street

that in winter bad children avoided
pelting each other with snowballs,
liquor on their breath, too young to drive,
to get into more trouble with the law.

Now I think the librarian was prescient:
not spending hours thumbing Lifes and Times
improved me. Usually I complete the book
even if I can’t recall the opening chapters

or the expectations I had for them. Content,
however, cannot lie flat on a photograph.
In our memories the stills of students
heckling cops or forcing flowers down
the barrels of their carbines cannot leap
from their frames. Alas we’ve dawdled
the rest of the century away-- like the moment


after sneezing when you can’t recall
the train of thought, or the warped record
liberated from the jacket age inhibits me
from touching or playing. I have outgrown

my taste with my regret: it’s a parka
hung on pegs in school or trampled on too much,
too torn to be a garment: please take it.
I will not wait for a parent to pick me up.