The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Wed 9/24/2008)

[RetroLounge]

Evening

For an hour or two the evening has no limits
Or so it seems to you as you walk the pavements
Of this, your adoptive city. Before you the sun
At play lights the windows of the office buildings
In the vault of the avenue, conveying odd images
Like the faces seen in the flames of the hearth.

For an hour or two the evening has no limits
And you are pedaling again your English Racer,
Riding double down the boardwalk along the sea.
Your girlfriend sideways on the bar, her legs
Dangling out of the way, the wind blowing the ironed
Length of her hair, the wind covering and revealing
The profile of her face. Her young body was snug
Between your arms when you steered the handlebars
Past all the frowning strollers. For awhile you forgot
But always it comes back, your brother’s cologne
You wore, the games you played on her parents’ bed
Until the headlights on the wall drove you home
Naked under your clothes. She is a mother now,
You suppose. It happens that people lose touch.

The evening has no limits and the streets go on
What could be forever, linking cities and outposts;
Suburbs that were villages separated by farms
Have merged the way they once were forested.
What it means to be alive has never troubled you.
Strange as you are you have always felt this welcome.

Stuart Dischell

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Stuart Dischell teaches poetry writing and contemporary poetry. He has published three collections of poetry: Good Hope Road (1993), Evenings and Avenues (1996), and Dig Safe (2003), all with Penguin. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Agni, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, New Republic, and Slate, and his poems have been widely anthologized, appearing in Good Poems, Hammer and Blaze, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In addition, he has received awards from the National Poetry Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the North Carolina Arts Council. He is a 2004-2005 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

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:hi:

RL