On the Way to the Diner

On the way to the diner, you think of Shakepeare’s home,
not the love cottage of flowers and thatched roof
he shared with Ann Hatthaway, but the tilted tudor home
perched on a bent little street in Stratford,
rich in woods and a bit austere, but still, crossing the sill
you felt chills that our spirit was sharing space with his.
Goosebumps and awe in the midst of a tourist trap,
worth the whole journey.

On the way to the diner, you think of women you have loved,
imperfectly, all of them, and wondered the the variety
and how it is that you were loved, at least for a while,
in their own way, by each of them. You wonder at the whys
of the connection points and the disconnection point and wonder
just how one is to know when love is a good thing,
or just another poison barb dressed in a rose.
No matter, You have loved well and gotten as good
as you gave, or at least as well as you could.

On the way to the diner. You pass Roy Egg’s shop,
that vigorous, deep voiced racountour of an artist
who greeted you early when you moved to his corner of Vermont.
Greeted you and encouraged you and gave you joy
in every visit,. It bubbled over in him, even in hard times,
and there were plenty. But never so many that the joy
was tamped down. Irepressible. His shop, a red and white
checkerboard of a house was like a den of delights,
this odd mix of classical and whimsy. You felt like
Alice in Wonderland every time you visited.

On the way to the diner, you think of the last week.
You have been sick with one of those unnamed viruses,
nothing the tests could find, or at least name,
and you realize how much you lost in a few days
of fever and delirium, whole days where you functioned
but Lord knows how, or what exactly you did or said.
You live in a slight fear of the reprecussions of what you can’t recall.
Stil, you are on the other side, your mind is alive again,
perhaps to much so with thoughts and feelings
banked like a fire, smoldering, smoldering
and suddenly aflame.

On the way to the diner. You feel your age and that is not a bad thing.
Just a thing. You have lived all those years of glory and stumbling.
You have soared and fallen like a stumbledrunk,
danced with the stars and danced alone.
That is what you remember best – the dancing. Music,
like a benevolent demon filling you, Music and dances of different ages,
historic, many of them history you have lived because you are old enough
to have lived in history and see it for what it is: a thing few of us learn from,
but fascinating, like a vivid Victorian novella, all gothic and romance
and dark spaces with an ending no one would suspect.

About this poem

It’s all about the thoughts on my ten minute drive to the diner in the next town where I write most days. And it’s actually only about half of the thoughts. One has to contain himself.

It all started with a dream of visiting Shakespeare’s home, which I have done. And from there my thoughts went all over the place. In some cases what I wrote is what I thought. In some cases I added things to make it more interesting. Poetry is an imprecise history.

I have been sick and mostly my mind has been in slow motion all week. It was good to get back to speed, so for me, the poem is a paen of joy. For you, it can be whatever you make of it.

Tom