It was not a gas station, right
Out on Route 6, on the Cape
In Truro that second summer
When there stood alongside
The white clapboard house
A payphone before there
Became a world without
Any payphones, I called her back
In Cambridge, she who I knew
From out west a few years before
I left there where it was cooler
And less humid and almost cold
At night under those forlorn stars,
But back here on the east coast,
The northeast my home ground,
New England my old home but
Not my region of birth, but south
Of there where the heat and humidity
Were even worse, and this was all
After Oxford and Vermont for me,
And after Harvard where she was now,
Finishing up slowly her PhD, and I
Wished it to be my Harvard again,
But at least I had her to call then,
Where I have no women to call now,
Or nearly anywhere . . . So after hearing
Her soft voice sounding both far away
And not so faraway I returned to the car,
Got gassed up and drove to Cambridge
And found a good parking spot near
The Square and The Grolier and Adams
House, and where she met me I’m not
Sure now, maybe in front of Au Bon Pain,
And we walked over the dirty bricks, she
With her moccasin-dock shoe sole flopping,
To the old cinema, The Brattle Street Theatre
And saw some old movie, slouching down
In those old seats, but before, or maybe
This was another time, no, before, we went
Down the street to the bookstore now long
Gone, where I used to browse late at night,
And I showed her the Harvard Review with
My piece in the heart of the journal,
And I bought my old Preceptor’s book,
His memoir in hardcover, then the film,
Then later dinner, where over a small table
In a Chinese restaurant it seemed like it
Might rain outside, but it didn’t but inside
Her words were a sort of rain my heart
Had not heard from her before, but didn’t
Wish to hear, but then I had to drive her home
Later in the dark to a place I did not really know,
And was not home to me anymore, not here,
Nor out west, but maybe this place would become
A sort of home to me again . . . but in the dark
We came upon a quiet street of crowded
Small houses and maybe a lean tree by the walk
And with her beside me I reached over and felt
Her soft hair and the coolness of her smooth
Neck in the dark with just a distant porch light lit,
And that was about the closest we ever were,
With so much past on the other coast, and now
I had gone from there and she would be gone
From here someday too in a few years, and she
Would return to where she began by cool-cold Bay.
Daniel won The Dudley Review Poetry Prize at Harvard University. Most recently, Daniel’s poems have appeared in SportScribe, The Arlington Literary Journal, FUSION and A New Ulster. Daniel’s prose works have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Georgia Review, The Sewanee Review, FUSION, Poetry magazine (Chicago), The Adelaide Literary magazine, The Oxonian Review of Oxford University, The Irish Journal of American Studies, Middlebury Magazine and many others journals.
Daderot, CCO, via Wikimedia Commons
