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I’m sitting at the same table again, in the hopes. This time I’m sitting where you were. Like a fragrance you had stayed to rise,
having felt just long enough under your hat, wanting exactly what you want. Like a fragrance you had strayed.
There are masculine and feminine willows moving about this room. Just now tiny machines manufacture noises
devoting themselves to the removal and the placing. Tiny machines manufacture noises producing
in me a feeling of productivity. Just now a shadow approached from the west door spilling
a glance upon me, sorry, I thought it was you sitting down in the place where your hands shook as you poured
evening’s sweet wine out in photographs. I watched you grow older in the approach. Summers are loose and feathery
in consequence as a high school, or a time, or a camp in which Right Now is a time. You say you think of it in a good way,
in the long approach, i.e. laughter and lightness and etcetera time of staying too long and leaving too soon,
sitting across from you, that absolute conditional you sitting down in the place where I had been a glance upon me.
Right Now is a time. A child needs to be moved less fearfully than thinking of something else.
What flower do you bring a flower? I’d curl up in the wrist, but there’s a cat already named there for luck and howling.
What flower do you bring a trouble? In the course of a sleeping farther away dawn grew your hair.
I watched you grow younger. When I look up you will be across from me. This time I’m sitting where you were.
Matthew Zapruder’s first book, American Linden, was winner of the 2001 Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. He is the editor of Verse Press, and plays guitar for The Figments. Originally published in the October/November 2002 issue of Boston Review |
