By Al Maginnes
I get it—live fast, die young, leave
a good-looking author’s photo. The books
like thin markers along the trail. This getting older
life is not pretty, up close or far away,
not at this age and not at twenty-nine or thirty-six
or whatever age your favorite sad bastard poet
stopped treading the daily currents and left us.
It’s not all joy and graham crackers among
those of us who are left. Mostly we’re mildly astonished
by time, which has now extended to swallow
cousins, classmates, parents, old friends and left us
here, blinking and curious. Which of you is
the voice whispering me awake, bidding me
to write this down before it vanishes,
before I’m fully awake, the way Keith Richards played
the opening riff to “Satisfaction” into
a tape recorder and fell back to sleep. Which of you leans
at me from the shelf of books across the room?
Today I drank an iced coffee that might have been made
by a poet carrying your collected works in their backpack.
Outside, the air had cooled enough to walk in shade
a while. I might have thought about a poem,
but it smelled like new earth under the trees, and I recalled
Lucinda Williams singing “Sweet Old World,”
and I wished you had been there with me.
—
Al Maginnes has published ten full length collections and four chapbooks of poetry, most recently his new and selected poems, Fellow Survivors (Redhawk Publications, 2023). New poems and reviews appear in Offcourse, Arkansas Review, Rattle, Lake Effect, and many others. He is retired from teaching and lives in Raleigh, NC.