Overlooking the Mississippi I never thought I'd get this old. It was mostly my confusion about time and the moon, and seeing the lovely way homely old men treat their homely old women in Nebraska and Iowa, the lunch time touch over green Jell-O with pineapple and fried "fish rectangles" for $2.95. When I passed Des Moines the radio said there were long lines to see the entire cow sculpted out of butter. The earth is right smack between the sun and the moon, the black waitress told me at the Salty Pelican on the waterfront, home from wild Houston to nurse her sick dad. My good eye is burning up from fatigue as it squints up above the Mississippi where the moon is losing its edge to black. It likely doesn't know what's happening to it, I thought, pressed down to my meal and wine by a fresh load of incomprehension. My grandma lived in Davenport in the 1890s just after Wounded Knee, a signal event, the beginning of America's @3Sickness unto Death@1. I'd like to nurse my father back to health he's been dead thirty years, I said to the waitress who agreed. That's why she came home, she said, you only got one. Now I find myself at fifty-one in Davenport and drop the issue right into the Mississippi where it is free to swim with the moon's reflection. At the bar there are two girls of incomprehensible beauty for the time being, as Swedish as my Grandma, speaking in bad grammar as they listen to a band of middle-aged Swede saxophonists braying "Bye-Bye Blackbird" over and over, with a clumsy but specific charm. The girls fail to notice me - perhaps I should give them the thousand dollars in my wallet but I've forgotten just how. I feel pleasantly old and stupid, deciding not to worry about who I am but how I spend my days, until I tear in the weak places like a thin, worn sheet. Back in my room I can't hear the river passing like time, or the moon emerging from the shadow of earth, but I can see the water that never repeats itself. It's very difficult to look at the World and into your heart at the same time. In between, a life has passed. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PHANTOM by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE JAZZONIA by JAMES LANGSTON HUGHES FRIENDSHIP; A SONNET by ALFRED TENNYSON MUTATION by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT THE MERMAIDEN by EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON THE WANDERER: 3. IN ENGLAND: THE FOUNT OF TRUTH by EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON |