Asking For Directions

January 9, 2009

I’ve said before that i’m a huge fan of short-shorts. Stories that are just a couple or few pages long, or sometimes as small as a paragraph (Manuel Munoz is a master at this–read his incredible story “The Wooden Boat,” as well as Brady Udall’s “The Wig”).

I also love narrative poetry, for the same reason: the author’s ability to tell a ‘story’ through the poem, but especially in such a short amount of space.

Oftentimes, the economy of language in narrative poems is, to me, quite breathtaking.

Here’s a sad, beautiful poem by Linda Gregg– which showed up in my emailbox today from NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac:

Asking for Directions by Linda Gregg

We could have been mistaken for a married couple riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago that last time we were together. I remember looking out the window and praising the beauty of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world with its back turned to us, the small neglected stations of our history. I slept across your chest and stomach without asking permission because they were the last hours. There was a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new Chinese vest that I didn’t recognize. I felt it deliberately. I woke early and asked you to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more, and I said we only had one hour and you came.

We didn’t say much after that. In the station, you took your things and handed me the vest, then left as we had planned. So you would have ten minutes to meet your family and leave.

I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion

and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you through the dirty window standing outside looking up at me. We looked at each other without any expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.

That moment is what I will tell of as proof that you loved me permanently. After that I was a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker which direction to walk to find a taxi.