The Innisfree Poetry Journal
www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Tim Suermondt



Détente

The buildings and the poems keep coming
and the dreams fester and flourish:

My father is working hard in the garden,
digging and pulling with robust satisfaction.

“Son,” he says, “come a little closer. I have
something I want to show you.” He’s holding

two tomatoes, one in each hand. “Aren’t they
big and beautiful? I grew them for you,

everything here is for you. Surely, c’mon,
you can understand me now.” I take one tomato,

thank him and tell him he can keep the other.
I walk away and travel down the street filled

with sunlight and construction, where on a busy
avenue corner my wife is waiting. We have a date.


Fine in Many Places but Here’s
One You’ll Really Like 

We’ll meet one day,
like a paper boat and
a watermelon that’s been cooling in the river.
                                                   —Nikola Madzirov
Almost perfect, and I love paper boats and watermelon
but I love land more than water, the streets of concrete
more than dirt roads, the city no matter how troubled and torn
more than the enchanted forest. Were it up to me we’d meet
on the long University boulevard filled with students on bicycles,
returning from Spring Break with a desire to hit the books again,
trying to be the scholar I could never be, those pages of history,
philosophy, science and the lonely romance of exams that promise
entrée to a golden future as if there couldn’t be any other.
A paper boat, a watermelon on the dormitory steps, a great comet
blazing across the sky the moment we meet for that first time,
your dress the color of wheat flowers blooming under the windows.



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