Poem for Joshua Ending with a Line from Diane di Prima by David W. Pritchard

You are not in the bus station
though you are in the bus station

you could very well be in
the bus station, here where I

have seen some very tall people
at a considerable enough distance

they could have been you
though they could have been anyone!

I am thinking of you
and not anyone however

so I see you in the bus station
you are not in

and is this not hermeneutics?
I’ve been in lots of bus stations

though never actually this one before
South Station in Boston

the only city I ever attended
a conference in, first

AWP and what’s worse modernism
in unnavigable hotels of Boston

I mostly stand around leaning
drinking water at these things

I have learned, which means
I have mingled without meaning to

among whoever is doing research on
or in archives, you know if I

discovered a new manuscript
by a poet I loved I would scan it

into PDF in the library and make
New Directions fight me for it

this is the advice I have for
the other David at the MSA

who is not me, thank goodness
as the man or men across South Station

are not you, but you
are not here in the bus station

to praise or not to praise
the situation, to ride or not

a bus which I will do soon
though you will not be on the bus

though you could be on the bus
as if somebody around a table

said all over again the word
possibility! which suddenly able

to name particular delights
we delight in, as a part

of the process we are
involved in “between Lenin

and lumpen” you might say
but this is not your poem, I say

I think I saw you at the bus station
I board my bus at the bus station

constantly at the bus station
happy to elaborate on the bus station

as the particular place
space location of an author

me, who responds politically
as is the hope (I will

not say dream!) toddling
barefoot thru the cities of the universe

 

——

David W. Pritchard is a member of the editorial central committee of Industrial Lunch, a magazine of poetry and visual art. He is the author of the chapbooks More Fresh Air (with Greg Purcell) and Impropria Persona (with Kay Gabriel), as well as a manuscript of country-house poems. He is pursuing a PhD in poetry and Utopia at UMass Amherst.

back