Incident at Jacobs Creek

            1984

Dawn Potter

So many nights we’ve squandered,

poking at this goddamn everlasting bruise—

why he doesn’t love me, whether he loves you.

knowing all the while that nothing shifts:

the jukebox downstairs keeps pumping out

its drinking songs, the man we love won’t love us back.

Night winds to an end, but if a lurid sunrise

glowers in the east, we’re not bothering to look.

It’s closing time.

Downstairs, a barkeep drags a metal shade across a window,

slams it into silence like a stockyard gate.

Trapped up here with us, old blockhead Charlie Rich

haunts this lonely town, searching every alley,

buttonholing every man, and, hey,

did you happen to see,

the most beautiful girl, in the world?

And if you did, was she crying, crying?

She was, she surely was,

but let’s you and I wait, and cry tomorrow,

when the tale starts mattering again.

Tonight let the one we love not love us,

if that’s what he thinks he wants.

We’re leaning together on this yellow couch

listening to police cars scream around the corner.

Let’s you and I pretend we have no story.

[a radically different version of the poem first appeared in Passion and Pride: Poets in Support of Equality, ed. Bruce Spang (Moonpie Press, 2013)]