back to
poetry
index

At Our Pond Again
by Earl Coleman

What revelation had she looked for, thinking that her snowy egret, in some human impulse, flew to her for sustenance, not just her pockets fat with bread balls, on his flyway somewhere else, but contact with her in some pas de deux, much what she’d sought when flying from our marriage to the wings of drinking men enfolding her, not Jewish seder-topers such as me, with no experience at belly-up-ing to a bar, but serious imbibers, placing orders for their bull-shots, boiler-makers, and Jack Daniels neat?

My sins had a more southern exposure, unforgivable, especially the nineteenth time she caught me out. Addicts, the two of us. Who knew what it was I sought, flying to those women, zipper open, upside down like Marc Chagall, my pockets fat with poetry or some such bullshit for their dreamy ears, their sustenance? What could I find in yellow hair or red when bourbon-brown was in my bed each night to love me if I loved the love I had?

Her ingenuity exhausted, mind in flight, forever on the edge with what it was she knew about my landing each time in a splash that doused the two of us, her weakness only for the drink, turning bottles upside down as though each wore a telescopic lens by which she’d find the North Star she was looking for. She has forgotten now, Alzheimer’s at its play with wild goose memories. She wings, now white-haired, toward that pond

where she can safely find a landing, softer than the clod she left.