Mark Halliday
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Pathos of the Momentary Smile
Like nearly all women under fifty she would have deftly
avoided meeting the eyes of an unknown man –
but occasionally an exception happens by chance
and her unconscious skill at avoidance gets instantly
replaced by a human generosity which is either
inherently feminine or gender-trained, as you please;
she glanced at me exactly when I glanced at her
in the store at the mall and so she gave me
that momentary slight smile which implies
Though many men are dangerous, and I do not intend
to suggest the slightest likelihood that you and I will
meet or talk, much less make love and
much less together conceive a sweet helpless child,
still our eyes have just met and in this there is
an undeniable contact between your humanity and mine
and you are probably coping with some difficulties
of masculine humanity while I cope with those
of feminine humanity; and so I wish you well.
Her smile said this
but I did not smile back because –
because guys don’t do that – because
we are strong and separate and firm and without softness!
So then the next moment had come and we had walked apart
in our two differently inflected kinds of routine loneliness.
His Alley Metaphor
He wanted a figure for how his disease (which would kill him within a year)
seemed – he said it was as if
he’d been walking briskly along a busy sunny street
full of bananas and scooters and actors and sex
on his way to a lunch date with someone of quirky allure
when for no special reason he turned aside into an alley,
not even an alley but a shady ignominious passageway
that promptly grew more narrow and darker and then
still only a few feet from the bright fluttering street
he found that his life was now this grimy dark passageway
which was not a passageway to anything visible
as it seemed to end in dark concrete a little farther along
and his eyes filled with the nothing but stained and forgotten concrete
and I thought this was a good metaphor
more obvious than some metaphors but with justification
and I hoped my friend might get a little satisfaction
maybe from writing down his metaphor and maybe publishing it
though he seemed less “ambitious” than in recent years
and more interested simply in finding that a friend of his
could for a minute really get what he meant.
Maria's Mexican Food
At 8 p.m. on a Monday night in San Diego
Maria’s Mexican Food is already closing and I am the only customer
and they want me to leave soon but I will calmly finish
my enchiladas rojas, I don’t need to feel tense or silly,
why should I? It occurs to me now that in Philadelphia it is 11 p.m.
and I know there’s a guy in a Mexican restaurant near the Delaware River
in the same situation, the waitress is actually beginning
to mop the floor --
Listen my brother! Do not quail!
You are within your rights and you are not a pathetic cipher.
Go ahead and fork up those last bits of salsa and rice.
I see you there O my brother, you are not alone
in this darkening vale of closing restaurants;
for I in San Diego am with you in Philadelphia
defiant of space, defiant of our ostensibly drastic isolation!
Courage, far brother there near the chilly Delaware:
stand tall and leave a decent tip and slowly stroll forth.
Bio
Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. His fifth book of poems, Keep This Forever, was published in 2008 by Tupelo Press.