Posted on April 26, 2022 at 10:26 am by West Side Rag
The Roscoe Diner. Photograph by Kenneth C. Zirkel via wikimedia commons.
“I am an American who lives in Rome and speaks a lot of languages, with which I supervise foreign versions of American films. I also come to the UWS about four or five times a non-pandemic year and live at 96th and Broadway. This is a birthday present to my granddaughter, whose initials are S.E.D. and who applied to 26 colleges.”
Lives in Wait
By Jeff Davidson
On this 18th anniversary of your getting a foothold on the world
I am magnetized by the vast number of potential lives lying in wait for you
Scattered, sprinkled, flung out across the country
In a random pattern of kaleidoscopic venues
Only one of which will be the stage set of your quadrennial future.
I turn the crank and my nickelodeon images of you roll by:
You are lolling on 26 verdant lawns in front of 26 towered and brimming libraries
With 26 different clusters of feasible friends and putative partners
Outlining 26 tentative term papers in 26 unchosen realms of human endeavor.
You and your color-in-the-blank companions are trying to decide
Whether to spend the evening in a little Iowa town’s single movie theater….
No wait, you and Who are walking down Broadway from the campus
For a bagel and cream cheese at the Metro Diner….
Cut to S.E.D. and X and Y and Z looking out the warm dorm window
Watching the gentle snow falling on New England evergreens.
Or Something. Somewhere. Somebodies.
Pick a college, any college.
And all those other lives will go unlived.
And then I thought: the existence of my lovely, brainy, one-of-a-kind granddaughter is the direct result of Yale’s decision to wait list me.
happy B/ love J
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April 26, 2022 at 09:27PM
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West Side Rag Poetry Corner: 'Lives in Wait' - westsiderag.com
"wait" - Google News
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