What’s Love Got To Do With It?

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head,

but love. – John Fowles

As a boy I didn’t know there were things

that someday I wouldn’t know how to ask

for and even more than this that the inability

to find the right words to ask would last

a lifetime.

As a teenager I could see what I wanted

in magazines held against the wall by rubber

cords in Pierce’s drug store.  Behind the

magazines in front were little magazines

for “truckers”  with black and white pictures of

. . . well, smut.  Smut became what I wanted

to ask for although I would never have called

it that.

In my twenties, my questions became the need

for a story and my questions took a back seat –

sometimes literally. With stories we could

understand and the questions would, in time,

be answered. But that just never happened. 

And because the girls I knew, if they had

questions at all, seemed self-satisfied in dancing

their questions to music while standing in the

same place, we made little sense together.

I didn’t have a clue. 

Coming home one night in my forties after

working twelve hours my oldest son dressed

as a knight rushed me with a plastic sword.

My wife put him up to it, thought it was

hilarious, but I was dead on my feet from

working a job I had no love for.  The old

questions came back and slowly the importance

of the story went away.  I began writing poetry,

and only poetry.

Now at seventy my life is fraying at the edges

again, and the old questions are buzzing

in front of my eyes like flies.  I walk miles every

day.  I walk, not so much, as exercise I think but

as a subconscious urge to leave.  I like the country

and its people, but my family here ignores me

because I am old and not Thai. They revere

old age, but not in a foreigner with too many

questions.  Buddhism, like all religions reduces

life to as few questions as possible. I can forgive

them; still I walk every day.  I walk religiously.

I tell myself I do it to stay alive, walk or die.

I walk away in the morning and then come back.

I trace a circle always facing traffic going the other

way.  Boy and man, I can still not find the words

to ask. 

FG           10/27/2015

The title is from a song by Tina Turner.  John Fowles wrote the Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  I think both novels have two endings.  What’s up with that?  Well, there’s a question.

Rivers & Prayers fits in with this poem . . . somehow.

Because I mention Pierce's I was going to put this on the We Grew Up In Goffstown site, but I doubt any one would care to read it.