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Some dreamily smoke cigarettes, some track

By Marianne Boruch b. 1950 Marianne Boruch

Some dreamily smoke cigarettes, some track

toddlers who walk like drunks. Buzzy,

the picnic grounds, noisy, sun-crazed, how

forks and spoons don’t exactly lie flat.

A mountain’s here, a famous overlook

from which you’d see none of this. Like that

first daguerreotype, its moving carriages

and those who strolled never picked up

in the long exposure, a Paris street emptied

by the camera, only houses and lamp posts

gone eternal. Or the one who stopped

for a shoe shine, the one who knelt to the task.

At the picnic—a commotion. A large man

to a younger man. I don’t know you! he’s hugging

and laughing. I don’t know who you are,

he shouts over and over a stillness so immense.

Source: Poetry (October 2009).

Biography

Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Book of Hours (2011); Grace, Fallen from (2008); and Poems: New & Selected (2004). Her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (2011), concerns a hitchhiking trip she took in 1971. In the Blue Pharmacy (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995) are collections of her prose on poetry. In an interview with Brooke . . .

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