Liz Ahl
On the Eve of Social Distancing
This morning, in the diner on Rt 25,
this last morning before we get serious
about holing up and staying put past the reach
of the virus that’s using us to spread itself around,
this last morning I don’t know is the last morning—
I’m the sole customer enjoying
the vintage aquamarine and chrome,
the chunky ceramic mug, the quiet.
Here at the counter, the original Formica’s worn,
and the owner tells me how she wouldn’t let them replace it
when they bought the place—shows me the spots
where seafoam green’s rubbed away at the counter’s edge
to underlayers of yellow and brown—demonstrates
with her own arms how it’s obvious evidence
of decades of customers’ arms resting there
as they straddled these stools, as they hunched
over their bottomless cups of coffee,
their pot roast, their newspaper, the quiet fellowship
of their shoulder to shoulder Yankee solitude.
With their skin and sweat, their collective
leaning in and out, they made and left behind
these flat curves for me to read this quiet morning
like fingerprints, or more like the gradual epics
revealed by high water marks or spoken plainly
in the slow, secret hieroglyphs of tree rings—
not the ones we see in the revealed cross-section
of a felled white pine, but the ones still cloaked
in common bark, still growing in the wet, living wood.
—Submitted on 04/13/2020
Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), Home Economics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016), Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine (Slapering Hol Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. A recipient of several residencies including at the Vermont Studio Center, Ahl lives in Holderness, NH.
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