Porchlights, and: The Last Couples Leaving the Green Dolphin Bar

PORCHLIGHTS / David Wojahn drill their yellow holes in evening and where you walk the houses go on drifting with their cargo. You've tried to sleep, but now you find your image gleaming from the puddled, sidewalk water, the payphone's light. You hold each other's gaze, but you know it's just your face, know this isolation doesn't scare, though you wanted, simply, to glimpse another life, the way new lovers do, even when they dress so shyly in the morning. Remember them? They ate breakfast on a porch in Maine, secretly ashamed of loneliness, how the whole intoxicating mess began again the night before. This is why the woman's fingers turned her napkin into flakes of snow, why the man would think of houses floating dully with their loads and watch a young dalmatian penned inside a neighbor's yard. It howled, and wound its leash around a tree, its radius a little smaller. The Missouri Review · 25 THE LAST COUPLES LEAVING THE GREEN DOLPHIN BAR / David Wojahn Because it was the end of summer the red moon caught in skittish treetops and our bodies made a kind of speech like breaking glass, far off. The young Chicano men turned radios up loud outside. You stayed up late to read detective stories in the broken chair, white run sweating on the tabletop, a towel on your head and the loose printed robe from Marakesh. Because it was the end of summer the only rains since April skimmed the red tile roofs and empty lots, falling on those couples from the Green Dolphin Bar, four hundred miles from ocean, who set their mugs and glasses down and cast their shadows on our bedroom wall. They made their paths unsteadily toward home and slept, unsurprised by anything. At the windowsill, after you could finally rest, I'd watch them in the evening's dreamy undertow, not thinking how the smallest detail 26 · The Missouri Review changes memory to distance. Didn't you stir then, troubling the sheets until, from sleep, you asked who called your name? Even then, it was not too late. David Wojahn The Missouri Review · 27 ...