Skyeline
We had to share a table
in the packed pub on Simmer
Dim,
the longest day of the year.
They were German,
but not fat and pushy like we
thought,
but slim, young, attractive.
The locals said we must drink
till dark, listening to the
band
play Scottish songs.
We parted as the sun, which
never set
but stayed a gash of red
above the hills all night,
began to rise again,
said, see you soon,
and laughed at the
unlikeliness.
On Loch Ness I wondered
at the windsurfer skimming
out on the black water,
if he worried something might
rise
to suck him down, thup,
like a trout taking a mayfly
on "the hatch"
when they only live a day.
We drank the real Budweiser
and fifty-year-old Glenlivet
from a row of bottles on a
shelf,
a pound for every decade
since
it bubbled from the ground at
Josie's Well.
I forget what "accident"
brought us
together again on the Firth
of Forth,
but remember running into
them
the final time
outside a show in London.
We stood on the sidewalk and
swore
to write, to visit,
that fate intended us
to be friends forevermore.
We've lost touch, of course,
these thirty years,
which seems like an eternity
of disease, deaths, divorces,
and yet no time at all,
all of us still skimming
along
on the only day we'll ever
have.
Will Greenway's tenth
collection of poems, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the
Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection, Ascending
Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry
Series. His work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review,
Southern Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner,
Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah.
His awards include
the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors' Prize
from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's
Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant,
an Academy of American Poets Prize, and he has been named Georgia Author of the
Year. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State
University.
