Poetic Pairings: April 2015

A Painting and a Poem that reflect the anxieties of city living.

George Grosz Metropolis MOMA 1917


He Dreams of Falling

At the table in patio seating,

a young man starched into my evening

in waiter black and white--

he's probably named John, Tom,

something less spectacular than the busboy 

named Ari at the table beside me.

He is a boy I've seen and I hide that from him,

a silence he doesn't understand as he turns away 

not remembering that a week ago while waiting for a bus

I saw him step over the legs of an old

homeless woman

sprawled on the sidewalk. His foot

not clearing her arm, caught,

so that he jerked her body

while a consciousness

almost found her but didn't,

just stirred somewhere below her face.

In the spiral where he turned he glanced 

not at the woman but to see who'd seen.

He saw me watching him, jack-lighted and drawn

into the warm ceremony that fell through him.

I understood this explosion,

the burn from the beginning,

there when a bus passes, or a waiter

quietly puts down your check.

He could be my brother,

have parents at home in Ohio where there is a small lie

buried in a garden with snow peas and basil.

There may be another breaking the soil,

dogs who bark into the woods,

constellations who see our freeways as spines--

or he may miss a warm climate,

groves of oranges measuring the circular

scent of weight each time a heavy fruit falls.

He may know that secretly 

the hearts of children conspire to stop 

when parents close their bedroom doors.

But in this construction,

the pace that takes him back and forth

in the servitude of strangers,

he has forgotten, again, to feel for me,

eating alone, a woman familiar

deep in the eyes,

with his same knowledge of movement

that bends us forward,

the instinct of our heels

ready to turn against that jerk a body makes 

even in dead sleep,

the stir that is less than we ask for,

less than an old woman,

or a woman growing old.

Ruth Ellen Kocher