February 2022
Bio Note: As this pandemic grinds on into its third year, one way I’ve occupied my increased time at home is by revising older unfinished drafts that I find in my journal. Since I have been following a daily writing regimen for many years, I have thousands of these. Often I don’t remember writing them, and most are indeed forgettable. But here are a couple from two years ago that I thought might be worth sharing, once I tidied them up a bit. More detail on me and my doings available on my website. www.davidgrahampoet.com
My Fashion Sense
I am steady as she goes, right at the speed limit, happy standing back, one guy in the crowd looking the common way. Same haircut I had as when I was twelve. Green and blue—what other colors do you need? OK, maybe dark gray or navy for funerals. I like a ball cap with the brim out front where it belongs, to block the sun’s glare, but also to keep my subtle inner beauty from flaming out. As for shirts, any one with most of its buttons, fairly recently washed if possible. And pants nothing you’d notice, except for the size. Ditto the shoes. You won’t remember mine and I sure won’t notice yours, much less have an opinion about them. I don’t clean up particularly well. In a three-piece suit I look less like a Gilded Age card shark and more like Elmer Fudd. I was Relaxed Fit before it was invented. My pockets still bulge as when I was a boy, yet no longer with marbles or baseball cards. These days it’s treats and poop bags for the dog, plus my pills, of course, and pen and pencil even though I no longer carry a pocket notebook. My notes may be all virtual, but my ring-tone is pure 1959, a rotary-dial blare that makes me miss TV dinners and black-and-white movies. Did you know there are a billion Stop signs in the U.S.A.? I believe I’ve come to a full stop, then looked both ways, at all of them.
The Comet and the Moving Van
It’s easy to forget the sky here. Once in a while, glimpsed between the neighbors’ garage and that big old maple, a slice of sunset more vivid than gumballs. We go to the window and point, say how spectacular it must look over Lake George, where we are not. And that comet everyone’s talking about? Well, missed it entirely. But I’ve seen comets before, and frankly they’re nothing much. Even in photos this new one seems smudged, a bright piece of heavenly lint. Now I’ll have to wait six thousand years for a chance to catch it again. Not that it’s vanished. For thousands, maybe millions of years it’s been circling the sun that birthed it and which still gives it the only light it has, a jagged rock careening through the teeming reaches of the solar system. Sometimes, driving home at night along a stretch of interstate without gas stations or malls, I see the heavens truly for a minute. Like a song I had forgotten from boyhood it makes me momentarily glad and sad in equal measure. Then a long-haul truck from Ohio blinds me with its high beams, and the stars blink out again. My exit rises from the darkness ahead, truck rumbling past in the opposite lane. I see it is a moving van. Someone’s whole household rushing into the future. That family trusting it will see all its mattresses, books, and mirrors again. So much can happen on the road between one life and another. So many exits are the wrong ones, though they all look alike, with arrows pointing in both directions at the bottom of the ramp.
©2022 David Graham
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