Two Poems

Surrogate Toothbrush

In this dream, Bob Hass appears on my doorstep as the pizza boy.  He's young and pimply but I know for certain that underneath the pallid skin, juvenile razorburn, absurd paper hat it's Bob, grinning affably.  It's 1956 and Bob wants to know why I haven't been to poetry workshop lately.  "Because I'm not born yet," I tell him.  He just keeps smiling, as if this is a reasonable excuse, as if in fact he's heard this excuse before.  I keep trying to pay Bob for the pizza he is carrying in his hands, but he won't let go of it.  The more money I give him, the more tightly he holds onto the box.

Bildungsroman

Marriage : mother :: focus : _______.  My head hurt so I took the dog for a walk, first up and down the boardwalk across which sand had drifted in a sort of glistering scree I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.  I didn't want to.  I wanted the boardwalk never to end, just like the moon.  The moon was my portable sanity.  I knew this was too much to ask of a moon—any moon—but there it was, I had these needs and she never said no.  I came back again and again, to the moon, to the dog, to the boardwalk.  That's the problem with analogies.  The sand whispers and all you can say is Dearly beloved, let's go.

G.C. Waldrep is the author of Goldbeater's Skin (Colorado Prize, 2003), Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), and Archicembalo (winner of the 2008 Dorset Prize, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2009).  He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University.

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