Jesse

15

The Summertime Morning Gentry

The morning gentry, an idyllic folk,
on this vernal morning I watch them.
I love them for their heat,
ever-constant like the dead that
pray in the most loving way in the night.
One day they’ll love me too--
when I’ve eaten half a stick of butter in their name.

A girl made old too soon wrestles with a part
of her knows she can only kiss.
He wrestles back, and she cannot help
but leave the coffee shop above the books.
She wishes, I know, to love again
in a collegiate way--
to graze textbooks with her fraction of the morning gentry.
She’ll be spending all day in this bookstore, because
her hyperactive burden needs to learn.
“You look like a friend of mine,”
I’d like to tell her.

A mother and a daughter come in
wearing the same blue shirt--
they’ve just gotten back
from the city.
She’s just recently turned sixteen, and
as such, has left a letter of request
and mild persuasion
on her mother’s oak-veneered desk every day
since her birthday; I think
it’s working.

The local bagelry still gets all the love.
Like the yard of a new teen
who made it through half of the lawn before
the mower ran out of gas and he ran out of water.
This place, this rejected kidney donation
of a home, sits, it breathes.
Meanwhile, the owner of the thrift shop across the street
starts on today’s loaf of stale sourdough--
his employees, his only business.
They are fine with it though;
the kids love the low prices
on this season’s latest garden gnomes, strangely
similar to the ones my mother grew up owning.

In the park where
I first scraped palms as a child,
pop-art versions of me and my mother
feel like thinly-strung puppets, they breathe.
As I watch, I feel like laughing; but I stop myself,
because I’ve recently been told by a girl
who was caught laughing too loudly
in the library
that our racetrack is not a racetrack, but
rather a shallow and
uncharted martian sea, terrifying in unlimited numbers of ways,
so why laugh at something like that?

The college graduates around me
are all on diets;
as they sit at an early brunch with proud mothers,
because the ones paying need to get to work by nine,
and the other ones claim to be studying
for an entrance exam.
I pass, smile, resolve to let them in their peace--
One of the younger ones stares, lauds me from afar
for my books, saying
she’d love to read one sometime.
But she has more pressing matters to attend to--
so I leave,
long ago having come to a resolution with the fact
that her first post-collegiate vacation will
be to an island I will never see.

I surpass an old man on the sidewalk-- he smiles
as I turn back, hoping that I took nothing of his as I grazed his left side.
He’s been telling his wife that he sincerely believes that
he has one more poem left in him--
one more lyrical, more steady than he has ever felt.
And I believe him-- his Pulitzer
was my reading for last month,
and this song that he’s got
will constitute my reading
for another month;
an account of
some adolescent imbroglio set deep within
a tropical fruit that he brought back
from his last visit
to some island I will never see.
I turn back from
my new elderly friend, because a girl with two city-bound
train tickets tucked deep in her messenger bag
resolves to take on her
fourteenth-to-last day shucking oysters
in this place, she breathes.
She dreams not of islands,
those ones she and I know that neither of us
will ever see,
but of peripatetic dissonance, a hermitage
for itinerant souls.

Now in the library, I try to imagine
you in your natural section, browsing what
it is inside you that makes me want to learn every word in the language
and wonder what you’ll pick.
I once thought Dickinson,
for your eye color is strangely reminiscent of vinyl siding,
plaster, trees beyond.
but this library is expansive,
as I’ve discovered is your mind,
and I now wonder over Kafka.

The fifth book on the fifth shelf
in the fifth aisle of this library
is called “I Want to Kill the Dog,” and I’ve stopped believing
in human creativity as a cyclic concept.
In this place, the morning gentry,
my tuxedo-clad army,
my sterile, comfortable summer home,
my middle-aged army of men with newspapers jammed in the front of their pants,
my people,
are doing better than ever.
But I have you to hate for never sending a postcard in reply,
and I have started to act like the music
in a coffeeshop;
because, dear, lately I have been thinking--
maybe I am not what
I was,
what the Post-It note on my forehead said I would be.
Perhaps I am only an overzealous photographer, and
cameras with shattered lenses
are incapable of higher-level thought.
It is nearly my lunchtime, and you have been awake since four a.m.