Catalina High School
Tucson, Arizona
To Marla
I used to think
it was a futile fantasy,
but now it’s a kind of solace
that I sometimes take myself back
to our 1965 high school,
where I’m following you after German class,
as if hiking to Seven Falls for a picnic,
dreaming I could actually dance
and knew how to french kiss,
playing The Beach Boys, “I Get Around”
through my head, appropriate as I recall,
and wanting so much to talk with you.
And if we had had lives
free of the nightmares and terrors
I’m sure we shared in that darkened place,
I would have realized that somewhere
in the noisy Universe
someone would have been playing
a tenor sax—
low, sultry, willowy—
to the sway of your lovely hips,
and I would have asked you out.
Of course, that was high school,
a terrifying time, occasionally fun.
Did it really happen?
Such a never was time, it seems,
mostly out of reach now
just as it was then.
But I’m betting that that musician
is still around, still playing,
wondering how far and where
we have traveled.
From: Getting There
Unpub. MS p. 13
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