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Passion and Materialism

Passion and Materialism

As I walk, pushing
through the flood of the crowd,
awash under the breakneck
pull of the Flushing stores; the racial
mixture, muddy colored, vibrant, mulatto,
trying to remember her face
in this green melon-colored
slice of avenue. Wanting to, but
not being able to. Looking
for the prompts I need
to evoke her. For, try as I might,
there are only three ways
I can recall her vividly. One, by going
to a place where we had sat or walked
or argued in the street, sometimes,
not usually, I could see her
in my mind. Or by looking at others
who looked like her:
The long line of their jaws or
their flat noses: her jaw, her nose. Not
always. Not usually. Yet surely
the third was the simplest way.
I would wait for her, and
minutes before she was due
I would read signs; worried she’d be late,
And then, suddenly, able to remember
how she looked, so present,
so pleasant, so ravishing as she lifted
her arms to hold her daughter.

–Jim Feast


Poetry

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