Walking Through the Chicago Airport After Reading Tom Robbins’ “Skinny Legs and All” (Which We Decided To Read Together But Only I Finished)
BY GARTH ROBINSON
I’m walking the long hallway to Terminal C,
thinking of a line that you did not make it to:
“Bitterness is reductive in the most trivializing way.”
You’re moving to Jackson in the spring to work at a children’s museum;
I’m going to read Othello naked in the desert outside Sedona.
It will all be okay, Emma. This is my voice.
Here it is, this is a flower, here are your parents,
in love, here are mine, that is rosemary, it took up
half a line in a haiku I wrote about you, and tumbleweeds,
and the poem you wrote as we drove to Kentucky,
and here are kisses, and snow tires, and miles of 95 and 25
and smiling because something so slight can take up so many of my syllables.