Santa Fe Poetry Broadside
Issue #17, September, 2000 : -- -1  2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12
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photograph: second man

Joan Logghe : After Horses

                 

Draft Resistor

When we met in 1969 after the war
had started but not before it had ended
& I was wearing my plastic fake leather
mini skirt & you, your European
intellectual glasses & little did I know
about anything, being 22, but less even
about how you would counsel my current
boyfriend to act crazy for his draft physical
which he would do so convincingly he went
crazy soon after and had to be flown home
& you would take pity on me & visit
in your real leather jacket, son of a dairy
farmer, & I would talk to you from my mattress
on the floor surrounded by books & poems
& my small Olivetti typewriter on a stool &
you would sit in a chair above me & listen
but really hear Lake Michigan half a block away
& that was it, a man who confused a lake
with a woman & dove in, even in chilly
Chicago winter & a woman who loved anything
that brought her to a bed & some poems & 30
years later on the phone you don't know
what is on the table to make you happy
only I know that good food & work &
children are on my platter & how this love
story ends is a daily bread question & how
this long love continues is not exactly
an answer but at least the Vietnam war is over
& couples go there now on holiday.


Copyright © 2000 Joan Logghe.

About the poet.

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Issue #17, September, 2000 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.