What the North teaches

How true!
It is a strange accord of peoples' faces
telling a story that is retold, over and over.

In the next face I see
my old lover
tattooed arms and lovely
locks on all those
doors these days.

I do not remember
his last name just
the pain and innocence of
his brutality.

Oh, there goes that
girl I went to grade school
with her Metis eyes a pastiche
of insouciance and desolation.

I was not her friend, only,
unobserved, an admirer of.
The way her hair fell past her shoulders;
The pout of those
ancient lips.

On main street I
remember my long haired friend
that boy in college with.
The bronze demise;
The pony-tailed, post-feathered,
Postcolonial smile.
Sigh.

This is where I quote
Proust, Derrida, Homi Bhaba, or Pound.
Pshaw. Think of them and continue.

I will see my daughter's mother
In some corrider of the Union Gospel Mission,
We will recall old times
But never speak longingly of the past.
Dolce et decorum est

A casualty of this war
This dissected celebrated castigated
Provincial life.

A regular martyr for the cause,
who will I see on the campus steps
Orwell, Eliot, or Woolf?
Expounding on the necessities
History and higher education.

Will you tell her ?