
‘What to Make of a Night?’ and other poems
By: Paul Dickey
What to Make of a Night?
As I walked to your house,
I tried not to get old.
I concentrated on what
I was supposed to:
the wine, the walk,
what I would say to you
when you greet me
at the door and say,
sounding silly:
“Love, it’s 50 already?”
50 minutes, 50 hours,
50 days, 50 years?
It didn’t matter,
for soon, the night got on.
coming back home, in every public john,
you might see someone
Coming back home, in every public john, you might see someone
you went to high school with. In the stands, the girl he’s with
you undoubtedly be his wife. The kids they’re with will
undoubtedly be their own. And what have you done with yourself
since you squeaked out a narrow victory over Great Bend,
or clobbered the Larned Indians? Nothing, you say, you’ve
been going to graduate school. Changing your major through times
to feed three kids. (Nobody laughs). Got in debt, like everyone.
(Now you’ve said the wrong thing.) You go home, to the motel.
Once again you will be be husband, a father, the hometown
football coach this time if it kills you, and undoubtedly it will.
Meeting the Girl Who, if I Play My Cards Right,
I Could Become, of All Things, My (?) Wife
Ever you have you ever played
In a church softball league?
Or gone to bed with anyone
from Crete, Nebraska?” I have been
followed her by a U-Haul
loaded with phone numbers
hanging around like found keys
after objects had been forgotten,
crossword puzzles for which
I haven’t thought
of that last needed word.
“So, you’re from Omaha;
I’m from Indiana.” But quick,
let’s get through these introductions.
either this is true love,
or one of us lied about our names.
That is, how many times
must I take you out
to satisfy mutual friends
(who are always introducing us).
I suppose it might not work out
that you don’t like softball
like you say: But by now,
you and I are saying that
we could pool everything,
and together throw a garage sale.
All our friends and relatives
will come and buy up all
their old telephone numbers.
“Honey, can you believe it?”
We might still be so successful,
and not too successful, that we
can buy a home in the suburbs.
“After all this is over, who will care to sweep up the ash trays?”
For a friend, upon a death in her family
Sometimes the young have places to go and leave early. We say “God be with you until we meet again,” and the cuckoo clock clamors like a memory. Later if we need to, we can make everything out to be a joke. Others stay what seems like all night. Their conversation goes something. like “If I drink eight beers and fall asleep on the couch, I promise when I get up I will put eight beer cans in the trash,” or “Once I loved a woman from Buffalo, but she had two children.”
So anytime you want to call the party off and get your place cleaned up, you can phone the Municipal Sanitation Department. But I am not sure that they are open at 4 o’clock in the morning, nor If they will make a house call to pick up a member of the immediate family. And ‘for just this once, you feel yourself wanting to drive to the bank and take a taxi with him as far as you can get with your life savings. Once I had it all figured out that I could go all the way to Butte, Montana.
But no one would have been interested “In philosophy after they got over the shock of receiving flowers and sympathy cards.” So we find ourselves inside beer cans throwing ourselves against the hearth and intentionally not checking the thermostat, cleaning up this place only enough so that you sometimes can attract a better grade of people to your parties. When this bunch was over to my place, all they knew to sat was, “It must be nice to be a bachelor. He does have fine furniture, doesn’t he?” and “But after all this is over who will care to sweep up his ash trays?”
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Paul Dickey lives in Omaha, NE but he wrote poetry in Wichita, Kansas in the 1970’s. He published then in Kansas Quarterly, Mikrokomos, Nimrod, Karamu, and Quartet. Now in 2024 after many years, Dickey has now published for his early poems with a new book, I Forget I Live Alone.