Matthew LippmannSouth Going South
We were all at the same place once, maybe it was by the river, maybe at the rent-a-car parking lot, standing in cold weather, our breath mingled in cold weather, a winter sky so delicate and hard it was porcelain and maybe a diamond, we were all together with tea steaming and hot coffee by the big stadium in hopes the game would start soon, hot dogs on the grill, half naked men with beer, it was at a roadside rest-stop to pee, all of us in one car the way traveling is a song you make up before you can get yourself out of the backseat, the windows broken and the cold weather inside the cold weather a drum between our breaths mingling in air that made up song that we would forget as soon as everything stopped, all of us at the barn and taking turns with a shovel, the cow breath and the cow shit and the cows, everywhere, we got between them for warmth, and there was warmth and then it was gone when the wind came with the cold weather, fifteen of us, maybe eighteen, in a parking lot, at a dinner party, maybe between train stations on a train with broken brakes, at the same place, at the same time, ducks going south, south going south, a light in the sky and the cold weather as fierce as a kid in a wheelchair with two splints, maybe a butterfly in five orange colors and black, all of us together and too, we had names that we believed in and then that all changed and the names stayed the same but the colors were different and the way we put those colors to those names, one person in a prison of grass, another at a convenient store with six dollars, one more telling one other where to buy cheese and the pages full and the function of money and the road split between many worlds and the one left behind who couldn't figure it out even with the big map in bold directives.
Matthew Lippman currently has poems appearing in Pleiades, West Branch, and The Iowa Review. He teaches literature and creative writing at Roslyn High School and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
