Poet’s Corner – In the After Days of Before

By Leslie Prosterman

On the day my poem finally
arrived in the Displacement 
issue of Fourth River (adv.),
I froze waiting in line, early spring,
arriving too early at the then-
gorgeously painted, as-yet-unfired 
Middle Collegiate Church on Second Avenue,
early in that we expected
Psychoanalysis and Buddhism to begin at 6:30.
I started to chat with the person in back of me, both
transfixed by the cone of Earl Grey ice cream
from the Leeuwenhoek around the corner 
on East 6th St.,
that the guy in front of us was licking. 
Even though, freezing.
We separated to our own rows, but re-met
in the aisle
headed for ice cream ourselves.
We found that earlier in our lives
the two of us had climbed 
|mountains in South Asia.
And each one had made paper, 
and wrote poetry and now 
lived around the corner from each other 
between East 9th and 10th.
We made a date to meet for coffee soon. Warmed 
by the afternoon, I read
my new-published poem at home,
and for a minute my jaw stopped clenching, 
my brain effervesced. Thinking today—
of those painted walls,
their joyful memory not consumed by fire, of a serendipity of meeting,
of the conjunctions of unnumbered consciousness, 
of the centering
of post-meditation Earl Grey ice cream—
a rejoicing holds me. 
Thinking of the generous way the world 
sometimes works even now, even 
when darkness seems absolute: Rejoicing takes hold.

Top photo: Bigstock