Richard Widerkehr
Passing A Soccer Field On The Bus To Victoria, B.C.
for Linda
In the dark, I turned, lifting my head from your head
pressed against mine, turned and saw the field
in the floodlights, empty except for three men
on the sidelines at midfield. Pearl-gray goalposts.
How the men stood hunched in the black rain,
almost as if waiting. No game to chew over,
not one spoke. As we passed by, you slept,
and I didn't see what I had seen in the rain,
in the night, this afterlife we entered for a while.
Bio
Richard Widerkehr earned his M.A. from Columbia University and won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. He has two books of poems, In The Presence Of Absence (MoonPath Press) and The Way Home (Plain View Press), along with three chapbooks and a novel, Sedimental Journey. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily, Arts & Letters, Shot Glass Journal, and others. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review.