By John Freeman
means nostalgia, I’m told, but also
nostalgia for what never was. Isn’t it
the same thing? At a café
in Rio flies wreathe my glass.
How you would have loved this: the waiter
sweating his knit shirt dark. Children
loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging
toys and towels to the beach. We talk,
or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view.
Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation:
my imagined you is all I have left of you.
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"Every time I leave the country, I think about the fact that my mother never did," Freeman told Poets.org. "A few years ago I sat down at a café in Rio...the feeling I was having while sitting there -- wishing my mother had lived to have had this experience with me -- was the perfect expression of saudade, so I wrote the poem."
My Tuesday was a lot like my Monday only with more coughing -- so much that I was afraid to drive because I wasn't sure I could control my foot on the gas or brake. So I will keep this short, since I got very little done besides tracking down where Americans can buy the Yuri on Ice soundtrack and maybe accidentally watching some old Torvill and Dean videos.
Maybe it's because I'm so cranky, but the season premiere of The Flash did not do a lot for me until the end -- so many women, so little agency -- and catching up on Inhumans did even less for me. I should have watched the US men's soccer team lose their opportunity to play in the World Cup instead! From outside the amusement park at Coney Island:
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