no. 6 (Peter Markus)

But I could not concentrate on the earth while I made my way down the page

and the cracks beneath me seemed to fill with the weight of an old man's heart.

Jack Gilbert pens his way into a woman, out of her, and across state lines.

The end finds me sitting across from a blond girl in a small row-boat

wishing I'd learned how to row forward. This chapter of my life

was heaped into a pile and burned along with the times of being in love.

Look at the boats she kept saying, pushing the piece of yellow
from her face. A sun went up and down while she did this piece-pushing
and all I could smell was popcorn popping. It smelled like a car accident.

The boats glide like leaves on the river, like slivers of moonlit river-water
or the light that comes from between the pieces of her hair that string
from her small head. She must have been the girl in the book,

the one about the girl living and dying in eleven years, but all in one day.
That's all the time it took to read the book and it was all the time in the world.
I'll never know what it's like to be a gull landing on the city's face.