Dissonance, Poetry and Time - Day 23 - Sara Dowse

If I had stayed in America

would I have ended up in Berkeley,

in North Beach, or Haight-Ashbury?

Where would I draw the line?

Would I have been attracted or repelled?

How would the sex have been?

A man who is now no more

than a shadow, and was even then -

shaven head, jacket grey and gabardine,

looking like the war we had emerged from

too serious, so hip I found him square.

I had tamped down those terrors,

my lips were smeared with pixie pink.

I hadn’t abandoned my saddle shoes

and jazz was so hip it was square.

We danced to R&B then, Hunter Hancock, 

East LA, and when Rexroth came to town

I thought it pretty pretentious, 
the poetry hitched to jazz, I mean,

and my crew cut Virgil was surprised.
He must have known me better than I did then,
he must have sensed that one day
I would come around.