Everything happens at once
Snow lights the fields;
orange clay glows.
Two young Greek students speak French
two bus rows ahead.
I think easily of Matisse—the femmes
and lines. I’m holding a text message
in my pocket. I know it says
Je veux pas, I don’t want. I don’t either.
Our end was obvious at the metro,
when she let me go like an American.
The bus rocks on the old road, and green
houses huddle against a treeline.
Matisse had seven wives, and an eye
for Arab women in hookah smoke.
Somewhere in the trees and snow
a squirrel dreams. More nuts sums it up.
In childhood more is the second word—
after mama. There’s only so much to go around.
I pray to the cat in a dirt road
that I never see my mom again, until summer
when I’ll have buried this bus ride
with that last sentence, and a fear of cats
which Matisse could not sympathize with.
For some want is the second word—and then
no.
| Elias Simpson |
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