The Girl from Panama BY CLEMENS STARCK

The Girl from Panama

BY CLEMENS STARCK

I'm talking with Mike over coffee.

His wife recently left him. He's lonely.

We're both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps

plying the trade.

We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can

read a set of blueprints.

But when it comes to women . . .

 

I'm thinking about my mother, who is 91

and very frail. I'm thinking

about my wife, my daughters, my granddaughter,

my sister, old girlfriends, my ex-wife,

and the girl from Panama

in the reading room of the New Orleans public library

forty-five years ago

who slipped a note to me across the table, asking:

"Are you a philosophy?"

 

Rain splatters against the storefront

of the coffee shop. Mike and I are silent

for a long time

before going back to work.

 

Poem copyright ©2019 by Clemens Starck, "The Girl from Panama," from Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems, (Empty Bowl Press, 2019). Poem reprinted by permission of Clemens Starck and the publisher.