Saturday, January 10, 2026

Frozen in time Aug. 29, 2014

  

I stride through the narrow streets to where the water tower stands, a tower casting its long shadow over the Acme even in the dead of night, traffic thick on the street where you live, a steam of stream of headlights and resounding horns. I take refuge in the supermarket, the way my mentor once did, who himself imagined as I image his mentor did, striding down lonely aisles, although I think mostly of you, the poems I still treasure even when they are painful to read, fruit and vegetables over time coming to rot on the vine, while I crave fresh fruit from you, even when you have already moved on, down some other aisle, perhaps sampling things in the frozen aisle you know better than to eat, ice cream we both crave, or even meat too dangerous a fare you mostly avoid, both of us lost in the lost world, while I still crave the vegetables you once slice for me, viciously, deliberately, as if slicing pieces of me, while debating which aisle you should put me in. I hear my mentor’s mentor resounding in the poems you night, a treasure I still treasure even frozen in time.


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