Another Poem for Donna on a Crowded Saturday Afternoon in Kroger

She’s there again—she’s always there—at the customer service counter

as I and everyone else wheel our steely carts from aisle to aisle in search of

meaning in a bag of potato chips or a can of cream of chicken soup.

She is solving problems, taking back people’s discards, all the things

gone wrong in their life, all the ways they have changed their mind

about what they don’t want anymore. She could stand there and give

a bunch of men money for the wives they have tired of, tell them,

“Sure, we can take her back. Do you have a receipt?” Or the children

we wish we hadn’t had after all, or the jobs we have all been stuck in

for a time or two, or maybe just the boss we put up with who can’t stop

brushing by us. Can we get a refund here? A do-over? If anyone can

grant us that, it’s Donna, there ringing up the day’s bad choices, or last

month’s or last year’s, all our regrets. She takes the receipt from our

eager hands and does magic with the cash register or gives us in-store

credit that most of us forget to use, but still she makes us feel like we are

time travelers, able to undo all our mistakes, able to soothe all of our hurts,

able to get everything we want—instead of everything we ever had.

 

 

The Man I Did Not Marry

met me for grilled chicken sandwiches on whole wheat laced

with mayonnaise in a little underground pub on High Street. I was leaving

for the summer, and he was staying, but I kept taking the treeless highway back

 

into the city, and sometimes we would walk the concrete pathways

between buildings and stop. We talked about the other people in our lives

to make a crowded conversation. I was working then for the agronomy

 

office, writing up stories of crops and pests and the petulance of weather,

how a hard rain could save or spoil, you never knew, it depended on what

you had done to prepare. Every day that summer, the heat beat down

 

on every road. Soybean fields made promises they could not keep. I wrote

about storms, but what did I know? I went underground for lunch

where there were no windows. People came in and out, finished quickly,

 

but we lingered for hours, talking of nothing, ordering the same thing

as before, unaware of what time can do, how it, too, can save or spoil

a whole field of knowing. If the rain came, we pretended we could not hear it

 

from so far below.