The funny thing is, I don’t have specific nostalgia for my first love (sorry, James–but I’m sure you feel the same!) but rather for the feeling that kind of love engendered at the time. Thanks to the Writer’s Almanac, of course, for both of these. I love my daily dose of poetry.
Everything We Do
by Peter Meinke
Everything we do is for our first loves
whom we have lost irrevocably
who have married insurance salesmen
and moved to Topeka
and never think of us at all.
We fly planes & design buildings
and write poems
that all say Sally I love you
I’ll never love anyone else
Why didn’t you know I was going to be a poet?
The walks to school, the kisses in the snow
gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age:
our legs are young again, our voices
strong and happy, we’re not afraid.
We don’t know enough to be afraid.
And now
we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope
that some day
she may fly in our plane
enter our building read our poem
And that night, deep in her dream,
Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka,
with the salesman lying beside her,
will cry out
our unfamiliar name.
“Everything We Do” by Peter Meinke, from Liquid Paper: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.
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kathleen 01.29.09 at 2:51 pm
Wow…he nailed it. And, as you say, Paige — it’s about the feeling, not necessarily the person. I’ve taken a screen shot of both these poems, and I shall paste them in the terribly creative journal that I will start one day, just as soon as I clean the home office, put the outgrown-or-unused little boy things up on TradeMe.com (NZ equivalent of e-Bay), juice the rapidly softening fruit into a splendid concoction (adding rum or vodka optional, but highly likely), sort out the bookshelf so the OCD imp in my head stops saying “Dammit, WHY are the biographies next to the home improvement books?”, get off the internet and do what they pay me for here at work…yes, a 30-hour day would be nice. Or a PA.