Angel from Montgomery
The girl in the dorm room next to mine playing her guitar
must’ve been sitting, like me,
on the top bunk, other side of the wall,
and she was singing, sweet-voiced, Make me an angel, and me,
I wasn’t singing, I was studying, hunched over, Poly Sci or French,
and then here was longing like a cut,
and I wanted to be of that world, maybe be her, even,
though we’d never met. She didn’t care
about stuff like guys, I storytold, wasn’t into clothes, junk like that—
she was one of those all-natural types, you know the kind,
like her hair was thick as raw silk, and when she washed it,
she just let it air dry, and she was stunning in her bones in an odd,
go-it-alone way, and though she didn’t write poetry,
I bet she read it and knew who Rilke was, and, like me, sort of kept to herself,
not being unfriendly, just quiet,
and she was just like that other girl
in my history class, who was also somehow so cool, and our professor,
who was herself youngish and cool, also got that, I sensed,
the way she treated her more like an equal, and once I saw her—the girl—
stopped at a light on her motorcycle, not a big one, but still, I mean,
when do you see a girl like that, like she knew who she was, out there in traffic like that,
and she wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t. And we nodded to each other, slightly, before she took off.
By Susan Azar Porterfield
Twitter: @azarcole
Editor’s Note: The long lines and meandering sentences reinforce the daydream-like narrative of this poem, setting it firmly in a life’s sweet moment.
Leave a Reply