San Diego Poetry Annual - 2007

William Hawkes

_2 X 4_

The details don't matter,
a room, a hotel I drifted to
during a lunatic year,
the chorus of horns outside
blaring traffic strife.

What matters is the moment
an angel, or my unknown soul,
nudged a child's face one inch
away from a two-by-four.
Swung by another child in play
and not looking to harm.

I didn't tell their mom
and twenty years passed
and again, today, just now,
I'm caressed by nothing.

Ellen Bass

Gate C22

 At gate C22 in the San Diego airport
 a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
 a woman arriving from Orange County.
 They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
 the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
 and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
 the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
 like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
 like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
 out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
 from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

 Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
 She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
 her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
 kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
 the way it gathers and swells, sucking
 each rock under, swallowing it
 again and again. We were all watching —
 passengers waiting for the delayed flight
 to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
 the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
 sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
 taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

 But the best part was his face. When he drew back
 and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
 as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
 as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
 what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
 you're lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
 not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
 as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
 The whole wing of the airport hushed,
 all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
 her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
 little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.