Sara

The Uncaptured Orchestra by Derrick Brown

The chubby girl is struggling speed on roller skates.

She is alone.
She is in that crazed eye.
She imagines the neighborhood friends.

Most of the poets I know are fat girls on roller skates.

Few of them are in love,
but many know how to sing
the notes of the uncaptured orchestra.

I think the composer Randy Newman is like that.
I don’t think he loves L.A.
I don’t think he loves.
I don’t think I really have a friend in him.

The friends I know
who are in love
are doing something.

Love is busy magic.

Love must be magic
‘cause when my friends fall in it
they disappear.

I drove with a woman
across the mosquito creeks of Arkansas
to figure out why that was.

Looking at each other like surgeons,
daring the other to go first
I finally asked how long
she thought it would last.

She said she it didn’t matter how long,
it just mattered that it was.

I changed the subject,
told her about the lone roller skater.
I asked if she thought she had ever been kissed.
She didn’t think so.

We held still, then

a sky flush with moon
opened up like a ballroom
and her kiss broke the spine of the night
paralyzing the moment
into our skulls,
forever.