Peter Mladinic
Living with me is like living with no one.
Living with me is like living with a tube
of Brylcreem on a medicine cabinet shelf.
Living with me is living, period.
I’m here and not here.
I’m in Pocahontas, Arkansas,
across a table from Maura.
Her surname I can’t recall, only her face,
her voice, the café on the town square,
but nothing of the school we drove to,
the classroom, the students’ poems
we took with us when we left,
taking twists and turns into Fayetteville,
where we lived.
Years after our Writers-in-the-Schools visit
a poet climbed to the top of a stadium
and leapt. Years before, a poet
presumably leapt from the Golden Gate.
Why, we don’t know.
There’s much to live for,
in the life of things, and people we touch
and who touch us. Here
and in the inner life inhabited by one.
I recall Maura’s frizzy hair,
wire-rimmed glasses, face
and big-boned shapely frame that,
as she got up from that table,
beckoned an artist to paint her.