By Billy Collins
I am glad I resisted the temptation,
if it was a temptation when I was young,
to write a poem about an old man
eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.
I would have gotten it all wrong
thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world
and with only a book for a companion.
He'll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.
So glad I waited all these decades
to record how hot and sour the hot and sour
soup is here at Chang's this afternoon
and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.
And my book — José Saramago's Blindness
as it turns out — is so absorbing that I look up
from its escalating horrors only
when I am stunned by one of his gleaming sentences.
And I should mention the light
that falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches —
the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,
as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress
in the white blouse and short black skirt,
the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice
and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.
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Haze from the Bear Gulch fire in the Olympic Peninsula and from the Cameron Lake fire in British Columbia made Monday a cool, cloudy day with air that smelled like smoke. It made me low-energy; I got some laundry done and finished reading The Once and Future Witches (which didn't quite stick the landing, though I still liked it) but the walk to the beach made my eyes itchy and my throat a little scratchy.
We saw the Orioles lose horribly to the Phillies, had gnocchi with veggie bacon for dinner, then we watched The Bad Guys, which is cute and distracting from the state of the world, and then because of the book I finished and because I needed more distraction I wanted to watch Wicked again. Here's what the wildfire smoke looked like yesterday when the Blue Angels were performing for Seafair over Lake Washington:
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