POETS’ CORNER: DAVID LEE GARRISON ’80 AND KEVIN PRUFER ’92

Reunion Photo

by David Lee Garrison ’80

We remember classes, football games,

proms, and graduation, but we need

yearbook pictures on our nametags

to recognize each other. We are books

pulled from the bottom of old lockers.

Every five years we gather

to celebrate the end of high school

and pose for a color photograph

while moments from those four years

flicker black and white in memory.

It’s as if we are passing each other

in the halls again, only this time

we pause and huddle to record the moment.

we stand on tiptoes or puff our chests

or slip behind a friend to hide our girth.

There are faces missing—

some of us are gone, some cannot bear

to come back. We hold our smiles

for the cameraman on his stepladder

and squeeze together so everyone fits in.

—from Carpeing the Diem: Poems about High School, by David Lee Garrison, published by Dos Madres Press, 2017

 

 

 

Immigration

by Kevin Prufer ’92

When the wheels came down over Miami

the stowaway in the landing gear,

half-frozen and unconscious,

slipped from the wheel well into blue air.

How amazed he must have been

to wake to that falling sensation

and the rapidly approaching sodium lamps

of the airport parking lot.

The couple that owned the car his body crushed

was astonished at the twist of fate

that brought his life so forcefully into theirs.

Their young son would always remember it,

how just then the cold shadow of another airplane

passed over him, how the bits of jewel-like glass

lay strewn across the asphalt

like the dead man’s thoughts.

—from How He Loved Them, by Kevin Prufer, published by Four Way Books, 2018