October Morning
We are two spoons, cat against my back.
You are old; so am I. Something will happen.
Maples redden in the white window frame.
On the clock radio, numbers flip and flip.
You are old; so am I. Something will happen.
Cancer or heart? Diabetes or Armageddon?
On the clock radio, numbers flip and flip.
Car crash or stroke? Alzheimer’s or gunshot?
Cancer or heart? Diabetes or Armageddon?
Beloved walls shelter us, shimmer in the half-light.
Car crash or stroke? Alzheimer’s or gunshot?
Fleece blankets unite us, together for now.
Beloved walls shelter us, shimmer in the half-light.
My hand rests lightly on your muscled shoulder.
Fleece blankets unite us, together for now.
No doubt at all: Something will happen.
My hand rests lightly on your muscled shoulder.
Maples redden in the white window frame.
No doubt at all: Something will happen.
We are two spoons, cat against my back.
.
New Year’s Eve, 1966
I’m sure I did the best I could,
shivering beside him in the dark car
as we sped past the frozen acres
from Des Moines to Adel.
Still, I can’t help wishing I’d been nicer,
said something to melt the wall of ice
that lay between his stolid shyness
and my own nervous prejudice.
But I was barely eighteen then, having lived
for years with only a violin for company,
and it took me until forty
to learn how to do that.
Bill was a senior at Adel High School,
and at the conservatory in Ohio,
I had a crush on a pianist named Danny.
Melted ice was the last thing I wanted.
Not between him, the farmer’s boy,
smelling of Old Spice in his toggle coat,
and me, the sports editor’s daughter
in wire-rimmed glasses and Navy pea coat.
His mother wouldn’t let the matter drop,
Mom had told me, apologizing,
said he needed help “breaking into dating,”
said I would have to go.
Our dads were in the same golf foursome,
and at one of the post-game potlucks,
Bill asked the magic 8 ball
if I was going to marry him.
We were just kids, I told myself in the car,
then struggled to remember
what words came floating up in the ball,
while he talked about his high school friends.
He took me first to their party,
but they were playing kissing games,
and we made excuses and fled into the night
with no idea where to go next.
We ended up in some drafty, barn-like grange hall
with long tables and country music
and grownups carousing on the alcohol side.
The tables on the teen side were half empty.
Our boots made puddles on the dark wood floor.
We sat across from each other, leaning on elbows,
ordered Cokes and groped for conversation.
1967 was still hours away.
Later, back at home in Des Moines,
my parents had gone to a party.
Bill sat across the room in an armchair
until I tactfully sent him away.
But his wheels spun on the ice
in our driveway, and he came back in
and borrowed an old rug for traction,
and went out again.
Finally, I heard him drive off,
and I turned on the TV
and waited for the ball to come down
and thought about Danny.
I was young and selfish then,
and only now, at seventy in Michigan,
have I bothered to ask myself
how Bill might have felt on that date.
Was it very awful for him,
the shy farmer’s boy, being seen
with this tall, snooty wallflower?
Was he, too, waiting for midnight?
Or had he been harboring fantasies
ever since the magic 8 ball,
and was he devastated by my silences
and frozen body language?
And when his wheels spun
that night, out on the icy driveway,
was coming back in to ask for help
a humiliating ordeal?
It took me fifty years
to think these thoughts
and wish I’d been nicer
and wonder who Bill really was.
And also to hope that
despite our wretched misstart,
he finally managed
to “break into dating”—
and wound up in some warmer place
than central Iowa
on that painfully frigid
New Year’s Eve.
© Cindy Glovinsky
Cindy Glovinsky’s poems and stories have appeared in Aries, Barbaric Yawp, Bear River Review, The Chaffin Journal, Connecticut River Review, Fresh Words, Illuminations, Pacific Coast Journal, Plainsong, Ploughshares, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry collection, Unclenching, was released in September 2023 by Finishing Line Press. Several of her poems made the finals for the Tucson Literary Festival Contest and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In addition, she published three non-fiction books with St. Martin’s Press, and a memoir, Music, Lakes & Blue Corduroy with Thunder Bay Press in Michigan. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has degrees in music, English, and social work from Oberlin College and the University of Michigan.
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