IMAGE OF EARTH AND QUILL

Guest Poet Lenny DellaRocca



Act III

You left Karen for Christine when you took a bus to Key West
one weekend to see Tennessee Williams. You sent him a couple
of your plays and when he noted that you lived in Hollywood,
told you to visit him at his summer home down there where the
sun rises on one side of the island and sets on the other.
I always felt that you went more to be had by a famous playwrite
than to have him critique your work. Your plays were never very
good. But you hardly mentioned him at all when you returned.
The whole world was Christine. You'd even written a song with
her name.  A foreign exchange student from France who attended
some university in New York, she came to Florida on vacation
before going home.  Christine was a spell fate cast on you.
Or so you said. You left your wife and kids and went to Paris
after that. It was there that you met Aeita in the train station
at 4 a.m, slept with her, wrote her letters from France when she
went home to her small town in Mexico. Very easy living in Mexico,
you said. Later, you named the boy Carlos, after Casteneda. And
now you sleep outside somewhere beneath a tree, because Aieta
has got you all wrong, she has thrown you out.


August, 1998


Lenny DellaRocca's Questions:

This is supposed to be at once serious and humorous. Is it?

And is it understood that he left one woman in Florida for a woman in France and then left her for a woman in Mexico with whom he had a child? (Carlos?) This is a prose poem of course. Lenny


Correspond with Lenny DellaRocca at
dellarocca@earthlink.net
with your ideas about this poem.



The Albany Poetry Workshop