So Many Years Ago
Cigarette smoke undulating from my aunt’s lips,
And her boyfriend is coming down
On a bus from Tennessee;
And I am working so close to the smoking beach,
But I haven’t seen her in so long,
And still I do not go:
I want to be in Colorado secreted in the higher basins,
The important key-holes where the tourists
Are too weak to go;
In fact, I want to summit mountains that have never
Been,
Or have no right to be- for her, or one of my great
Great aught great forgotten grandmothers;
And her name is- just this,
Just a song happening in the night far to the east and
Under her,
Like a French man going down on a airplane,
Like a frog making love to an inebriated princess who
Just doesn’t care;
But that is all I have to say or even think about;
It was the best I could do when trying to remember how
You walked so tremulous and ecstatically real
Your painted nails on your locker’s combination,
Your painted toes in soccer cleats
So many classes, and forgotten generations so many years
Ago.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
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