They Were Children Together

I remember her white poet shirt and clean clear face.
She is on stage at the Mansion House, a St. Catharines bar:
Songs she wrote and songs learned from the radio
Brag of coarse and earthy evenings.
She sang, “…when I’m drunk I’m a nihilist…”

She jokes that her life is a documentary limerick.
She has two children.
She’s the eager daughter of rich peasants.
Impulse, defiance, insults, she defends as truth and a joke.

“I’m going to tell him you’re his father,”
She said to her best  friend while I listened.
“You don’t have to pay.
I told my parents you’re the father”
And while he cried she said:
“You could make everything all right for me.”


Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson

(this poem was published May 2002 in Shadow Voices)