here’s a first draft of a poem i worked on during the chicago trip.
missing a point (draft title)
In an O’Hare Airport cafe
a tall woman with red hair
and salt highlights reaches across a table
to take the hand of a younger woman —
fair skinned, dark haired, and softly stunning —
and clutches it while
speaking rapidly, leaning close so
only the two of them can hear.
I am so busy trying to decide
if they are mother and daughter,
close friends, relatives, co-workers, or lovers
that I cannot tell you
whether they appear to speak
in pain, or joy, or confidence.
Once again,
I’ve fallen
for the unimportant.
It is not that their relationship is unimportant.
We live and die by knowing what flows between us,
and by reaching rung over rung to climb together
from who we are to who we must be.
What is unimportant is my need to know,
my need to tear into the fabric
of what I see and analyze the stitching to death.
That is not my story seated in front of me,
and I will not be the poorer
for not knowing it.
I should say instead only what I know I see:
that two women in an O’Hare Airport café
are speaking quietly to each other,
and when connected at the hands they light up;
and they have lit me so well
that I know that tonight I will lie awake
for hours in their incandescence,
wondering what else I have missed.
Dark Matter 