Tuesday, May 25, 2010

You talk to an old friend and confuse Strasbourg for Stroudsburg, a city whose name you haven’t spoken in the years since you’ve been gone. You remember other words you’ve forgotten, put away behind you: turnpike, pierogie, Emmaus. None of them romantic. You read books. You read poetry. You look out the window at the lick of pink scalp on top of the man’s head as he walks. You remember fiction but don’t remember why it is that you read it. You watch television, split a kiwi and eat it with the skin on, indulgent in the unorthodoxy. Later you mistake something in your belly for shame but then feel relief instead, the chilly sweep, when you realize how much worse it would be to feel actual shame. Others also forgotten: vo-tech, homeroom, scrapple. You know, that mash of breakfast flesh usually sitting across the plate from the gelatinous scramble in Pennsylvania-Dutch culinary reservoirs.