TELLING STORIES

 

When I remember now those bars and restaurants

along the avenue -- most of them long gone

and forgotten, along with those hopelessly younger

versions of ourselves -- I remember, too,

how you loved telling stories about everyone

within your line of sight, inventing detailed narratives

that were alternately comical, or tragic, sometimes

outlandish, sometimes quite believable.

You knew -- for your own belief in the story

was always essential -- who was on their first date,

and who was on their last, who was celebrating

their daughter's graduation, and who was in mourning;

you knew the man at the bar was out on parole

by the way he clutched his fork, eyes darting like silverfish,

knew which bartender was skimming money,

and which wrote poetry on the backs of napkins.

Now that you have returned so abruptly to silence

and to myth, I can't help but wonder

what you might have said about us, sitting there,

observing, as though we held some secret wisdom.

Would you have invented a better ending

for us, separately or together, one with a bit of nuance,

some humor, or at least a hint of romance?

Might there be an opportunity for redemption?

Sometimes I imagine our stories go on without us,

while we go about our routines, planning

and plotting, setting one book down to reach

for another, endlessly distracted, the lives

we once thought absolute becoming less and less

believable, in need of reconsideration.

TUNNEL OF LOVE

 

Were we so easily amused a mere hundred years ago? Was the achingly slow motion of these tiny painted boats crawling through the water a thrill worth paying for, while we sweated through our starched, buttoned shirts and summer wool, hands folded like sleeping birds in our laps? Was it somehow old, even when it was new, creaking as though every motion would be its last, the thinnest shafts of light breaking through its walls? No, you assure me, It's meant to be this slow, so slow that you hardly realize you're moving. It's meant to go nowhere, letting you out right where you came in. Look around. There's a reason it has the longest lines of anything else out here.