Dan Campion

Skaneateles
 
The lunchtime crowd in that storefront café
in Skaneateles might just as well
have been Ulysses’ crew, so far away
from Ithaka their world lacked means to tell.
And our world failed to move them. There they dwell,
forever, over ham on rye and iced
tea on a summer day, caught in the spell
of our drive up to Maine. Our reels are spliced,
but only for that one scene, highly spiced
with mustard, brine, and vinegar, a scene
Ed Kienholz might have done, or Heinrich Kleist,
the pickles on white plates forever green,
those sturdy roadside diner plates, not bone,
and I alone alive to make it known.

Dan Campion’s poetry books are Calypso (Syncline Press), A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press), and The Mirror Test (MadHat Press). He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and a coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). Dan’s poems have appeared previously in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal and in Able Muse, THINK, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and other journals. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.