A poem which, although it has undergraduate flaws, I very much admire, by Joe Bolton...now dead.
In unrhymed tetrameter (w/ lots of Trimeters)-- I have heard it called BV Tetrameter.
Departure
for Tonya
Because it was a weekend morning,
You lounged awhile in the dustlight
Of your small room on 14th Street,
In that house like an old movie set.
I think maybe you sipped capuccino
And smoked one ginseng cigarette,
Watching the neon of the liquor store
Lose itself under increasing sun
And raising the window to let the reluctant
Spring breeze bother your camisole,
You danced a moment to no apparent
Music--that city already strange.
And already your dozen or so friends
Seemed strangers. In one cruel week
We'd turned away from you, as if
To lose you before you were gone.
Left utterly alone, there is nothing
The heart can invent to numb itself.
All around you on the hardwood floor,
Your old life darkened in cardboard boxes.
I think, now, of those twenty black hats,
Black haloes your face paled under;
Jewelry, photographs, a few precious books;
Little shoes in which to make your exit.
If love is an awkward, scriptless scene
To be played out between two people,
I cannot write it: I am a pattern
Of breath and sleep that city will outlive.
And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I too, was lost--
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.
East of that city, the green fields
Are winding away beneath your gaze,
And here, west of that city, there is
No water deep enough to let me forget.
If I could look forward, I could see us
In Houston, in Atlanta--that South
No train will take us to, that South
We lost ourselves in so long ago.
And those cities, so far removed
In distance and time--can our small stars
Survive those bright lights? Our language
Be heard above the din of the million?
Tonight, a hundred miles away,
Our city, made of circles and squares,
Must be much the same as it was:
The bars, the buildings, the streets empty of lovers.
It is a city we can never
Return to--a dream, a green light,
An unfound door closed upon the past.
Our words echo through it and fade.
[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited April 21, 2001).]
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