by Gerald Locklin

Are the confidantes he would most like
To take conversational refuge
From each other with,
But he’s learned each wants to hear
Absolutely nothing about the other,
Including, most emphatically,
Nothing good.
They don’t even want to go with him
To any movie he’s already seen with the other,
And if either suspects he has actually enjoyed
Any time with the other, she will try
To at least create the illusion of having
Been flirted with by someone new
Or, perhaps worse, someone from the past.

He is tempted to suggest to them both
That they just try to see it his way,
Or, perhaps, to ask themselves
The immortal query of Rodney King:
“Why can’t we all just get along?”

But then he remembers how well
That philosophy worked out
For Rodney.

by George Bowering

The ocean is always evaporating, he says, as if
he were Friedrich Nietzsche, human kind is no better,
I’ve reached a great age and no longer care what cars
look like, who’s on the radio, only the light reflecting
from your skin, only the freshness of the bread, only
some third thing to make the rhetoric familiar.  The ocean,
he says, offers so little, a thin surface you will break
at your risk, a history made up largely of defeat
or disappointment, as in soccer.  Dogs get wet
and clamber into cars, real fish and chips
have pretty well disappeared save perhaps in
New Zealand.  Yet the only awesome sight
I have seen was the immense curve of the Pacific
at midnight, lit by a moon a little higher than
this Boeing 747 newly entered the southern hemisphere.
My father was not in the window seat, though he
should have been, this wiry man who used to
wade into Lake Okanagan with a big white bar of soap.

by George Bowering

I was born in December, and now I’m in
the December of my life.  Has anyone seen
what next year will be like or whether I’ll
be there at all?  I only know I don’t want to
come to an end of hearing wonderful words like
sawhorse.  I’m tempted here to go to seahorse
and ruin the singular surprise of that wood, to
seesaw, with Marjorie in the sea salt, that
girl with the curly somersault, my grandfather
in Somerset could have taught her.  This silliness
a poet in San Francisco may have taught me
was all right, sawdust work around barns being so
far from ephemeral, which sounds, doesn’t it,
like a medicine you have to earn your way to
by growing old.