January 2018
Jack Powers
jackpo@aol.com
jackpo@aol.com
I teach special education and English at Joel Barlow High School. I've had poems appear in 2River Review, The Naugatuck River Review, Southern Poetry Review and elsewhere. More poems at http://www.jackpowers13.com/poetry.
Note: This is one of the first poems I ever had published. I didn't start writing poems until I was in my forties so this is a relatively early poem, but I didn't think that would qualify for last month's theme.
Note: This is one of the first poems I ever had published. I didn't start writing poems until I was in my forties so this is a relatively early poem, but I didn't think that would qualify for last month's theme.
He couldn't remember
why he got up,
why he'd come upstairs, tapped his pockets
for a pipe he'd quit years before. No urge
to pee. No wet pants. No growling stomach.
He wandered around the bedroom, raised
the accordion blinds on the narrow window,
wondered if he'd just forgotten how bad
his memory had always been. But then it never
mattered what he'd been looking for anyway,
it’s what he'd found. Like this paisley-moted
shaft of afternoon light bending
through the dusty panes; a yellow spotlight
like one from that thirties painter famous
for lonely men in a night-lit diner
and the girl on the long, sloping lawn. He'd
seen them once in a high-ceilinged museum
while standing hand-in-hand with a black-haired,
soft-faced beauty who might once have been his wife.
First published in The Looking Glass
He couldn't remember
why he got up,
why he'd come upstairs, tapped his pockets
for a pipe he'd quit years before. No urge
to pee. No wet pants. No growling stomach.
He wandered around the bedroom, raised
the accordion blinds on the narrow window,
wondered if he'd just forgotten how bad
his memory had always been. But then it never
mattered what he'd been looking for anyway,
it’s what he'd found. Like this paisley-moted
shaft of afternoon light bending
through the dusty panes; a yellow spotlight
like one from that thirties painter famous
for lonely men in a night-lit diner
and the girl on the long, sloping lawn. He'd
seen them once in a high-ceilinged museum
while standing hand-in-hand with a black-haired,
soft-faced beauty who might once have been his wife.
First published in The Looking Glass
©2018 Jack Powers
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