Poem: The Aging Bachelor Drowns in Memory

The Aging Bachelor Drowns in Memory

Charlie Madsen is deep into hiding, scratching out pages of English to his father, when the pageboy redhead rushes into the café, arms swinging in the backwoods slope of his vision.

Speaking to the room, she confesses that she is late because she lost her way, then goes to sit with her friends at the next table. The tractor beams of recognition stop her halfway there, pulling her gaze on a string to the right.

Charlie, in fact, would prefer that she were not there, has no ready vocabulary for the slick steel chains of attraction buckling his skin, but as she rushes over is overcome by the ice blue cut of her eyes, the severe line of hair shadowing her forehead, Renaissance cheekbones, and blazing youth.

Please, Rodrigo

drive me to my friend’s house

I will show you wide rivers of asphalt

tick-tock fields of suburban streetlights

and one tiny honeycomb cell near

the orchard where I spent

warm, liquid French toast hours

on a couch, with a girl

introducing her to the farther reaches of her body

thin shoulders, blonde hair the scent of

nutmeg, the skin at the back of her neck

(I whispered the word “condom.” She ran.)

And if it weren’t this street

it would be the avenue to the south

the boulevard to the east

and several bipartisan culs-de-sac

my former girlfriends peppered over the landscape like

shotgun roadsigns

Charlie succeeds in blocking out the UV rays from the redhead’s table and finishes his letter, is about to head to the counter for a refill when one of three dozen our-songs sweeps down from the speakers.

The fair-skinned Christian girl with

rotello curls of chocolate hair

a Christmas day two years before when they

danced to drunken country breakup songs

on a moss-green futon

her smooth Egyptian smile snaking its way up his neck

He is surrounded, buried

covered and done

had best just order a poppyseed bagel

stare out the window at taillights and oak trees and

settle in for the long night of forgetting.

First published in Comrades

From the collection Great Showtunes of the American Stage  

 

Photo by MJV