A Private Language
In the parking lot this afternoon, a woman (mid-60s?) walked down
the row, got into a silver Ford sedan parked next to me,
and sat there a bit like she’s really thinking, like she’s contemplating
existence, working on her thousand-yard stare, as I was loading
my groceries. Then she got back out, went down a couple more cars,
got into a silver Chevrolet sedan, and drove away. She didn’t
look around. 76 degrees. Bright, with clouds. She left alone.
No groceries. She’d had a cart. I remember, she maneuvered it
between the cars. Maybe it was a single bag? Maybe only one item?
She passed close on the way out of the lot, and she seemed to be
chewing gum or talking to herself or singing along to the radio,
“Flight of the Valkyries,” maybe or “Baby Elephant Walk.”
So she must have put groceries in the Ford, and didn’t
go back for them. Sometimes you just have to walk away.
Someone’s going to appear soon to a strange bag in their car
of what someone else was going to eat, or put on their body,
and now it’s on their backseat. Strange lottery. A story
they repeat for a week or two, this inscrutable thing.
I drove home yesterday and a pickup that looks like mine, silver,
rust arcs over the rear wheels, was in the driveway
in my spot, and I had to look at myself, touch my dashboard,
like one making the sign of the cross. And a laugh
when I get there and it’s a delivery. Yes. Here are my grocery bags,
my gel deodorant- frozen three-meat pizza- vanilla Greek
yogurt- etc. as the world goes by with its notes tucked away,
as the woman drives off, blinker left on across the parking lot
to the entrance, where it turns off, and then turns on again,
the other way. It’s lonely. I suddenly feel so alone.
Food Stylist
That the world contains a job called “food stylist” fills me
with hope. Hope for what, I’m not sure, maybe just hope
in general. I’m sitting on a floating dock at sunset, reading
a book of poems by a poet recently dead. It’s been a long week.
A boat docks and my world shakes. I regard my notepad
and pen warily. It wouldn’t take much more than this
for my reading space to become a kind of cartoon catastrophe.
Some lake sailors walk up the ramp, and my world bobs.
I’m a buoy or a cork, and my transformation has been easy
and short-term. For most people, it’s a long life, if 84 or so
is long. I don’t know how to measure “long” in this context.
My father’s 95, and he seems to think he’s ready,
but I’m not going to ask him. What if he says no? Dan,
still young, going into hospice, wrote that he was scared,
and all I have to say is “food stylist,” someone out there
is a food stylist. And, like now, how life is pretty on a lake.
Some squawky birds have started up behind me that I can’t identify.
The world is full of these sorts of things. Trees! Lots of those.
And somewhere out there a food stylist is driving home
and I’m reading a book of poetry by a poet recently dead.
Infinity fits between them, as an infinity fits between 7:59
and 8:00, as an infinity fits between any two things
until I guess it doesn’t. Infinity is another word for “thought
experiment,” and doesn’t work so well in telling time,
like Chinese lanterns floating above an abandoned circus
at night, or imagining a diner in the Sonoran desert,
two early-model cars cockeyed in the parking lot, and look,
the sunset’s going out. And maybe I’ve never understood hope.
John Gallaher’s new book of poetry is My Life in Brutalist Architecture, just out from Four Way Books. He lives in northwest Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.
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